


Hale's Moving Castle

by ecarian



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Howl's Moving Castle, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 13:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecarian/pseuds/ecarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once fine day Stiles is turned into an old man. He has to search out a powerful wizard in order to turn him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hale's Moving Castle

**Author's Note:**

> This is my submission for the teen wolf reverse bang. I managed to snag [this](http://kickingshoes.tumblr.com/image/40480302055) lovely piece by kickingshoes. Howl's Moving Castle is one of my favourite books/movies of all time. So this fusion has a bit of both worlds. I hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> Many thank to my darling Kidder who checked this over for me and always made me feel good about my writing, even when I faltered. You are the best.

That first winter after the start of the war was muggy and slushy and not very cold; mostly still miserable in the way that not-green nature always seemed to be.

Gossip blamed all the bombs going off at the border making everything too hot for snow. Stiles once lived through a hurricane down in Porthaven, nose smushed up against the corner pane of the window, fogging it up with his breath, watching trees blow sideways until their rangy branches touched the ground; people out of their shoes; swept two of the leaning beach houses down on the coast away like bits of crinkly garbage. Nature didn’t bow to man, he thought, but Beacon was a valley-town side-note on the rail lines from Porthaven to Kingsbury, and would believe everything for the sake of it.

Mid January, rolling his feet from heels to edges to toes to keep off the frosty brick, Stiles was out on the stoop to pick up the milk. It was a bitter early-rooster morning and there was a stumpy lady across the street over by the stoop of Collaby's Clocks and Cogs. Her thick wool jacket had a lapel full of red and white and green weather charms, which weren't real magic, he was pretty sure; but that never stopped the hopefuls.

He paused and watcher her hurry down the street. She stopped once to stamp her ankle boots in a sludgy puddle off the curb. Then she disappeared around the corner; trailing footprints. The only other person out this early was a stumbling, drunk soldier, the crooked line of his back was to the shop, strangely unwieldy in his uniform, limping; probably an injury. It felt a little like Stiles was being watched even though there was no one else. When he latched the bolt to the shop, it stuck a little in the socket.

Back in the kitchen, Stiles twirled the milk bottle across the flat of his palm and then set it down on the table and said, "I'm thinking of a market venture."

"No," Lydia grumbled at once from over by the hearth and the screaming iron kettle. She grabbed the milk and doctored her tea and then a second for Dad. She was in her nightgown and a panicked halo of hair, one hand clawed into the knotty green throw around her shoulders.

"You haven't even heard me out!" Stiles said.

"No," Lydia repeated.

Allison laughed from over by the stove and swept her glossy dark curls over her shoulder.

"Whatever," Stiles said, and made a face at her. "I'm thinking magic charms. You know, like the stalls down on Market Street."

Lydia hummed and considered it. "The weather ones? People will think we sold out."

"What? No, they will not," Stiles insisted, "Fink down on 5th is doing it. Come on, I could totally make better ones."

She sipped her tea and then said, "Fink sells cat skulls.” That was true, and he also sold beads made out of mud and only ate salted frogs he caught out in the bog, "People fund him out of pity. It's a fad and it'll only hurt in the long run."

"You're totally wrong and I'm not listening to you," Stiles said.

"That's healthy," Lydia agreed, dry, and Stiles sniffed and left to get dressed.

—

It was true, though, and it was what people would think; _Pins_ had been Stiles’ mother’s shop, and his grandmother’s shop and all their other mothers’ shop since the whisper quiet founding of Beacon. The deed was this delicate onionskin thing they keep in a rosewood box in the closet. It was a storefront with a workshop and a cozy four-bedroom up a cramped rear staircase and a wild flower garden fenced in with big grey brick It was tucked between a doll shop and an old antique place with a stoop bookended with wrought iron crows, and it had been around too long to start scoping out the magic market. People got fussy and nervy and didn't want to give you money when you started changing things.

It didn't stop Stiles from thinking they should take a chance on it later that night when he was going over his ledgers and coming out of in the reds. The war had left everyone's pockets a little light; it just wasn’t cold enough to justify a new coat or scarf—a patch job maybe, when an extra layer wouldn’t cut it, two pairs of socks.

In the end, since Lydia was almost always right and he wasn't about to willy-nilly throw his mother's morals—his own maybe but not hers—out the window and trick people out of their money, he just set aside the papers back in his ledger box and stored it under his station.

His dad popped a head in the door, yawning, hair flat and then spiked lopsided as he ran a hand through it, sheriff browns wrinkled. There was a tear in the armpit that needed mending and his dad said, "Going to bed soon?"

Stiles hesitated. He had a heavy black velvet cloak to line with a shimmery pearly blue satin that he hadn't started on, but he said, "How soon is 'soon'?"

"In an hour," his dad said, which was clearly unreasonable, so Stiles said, with a wide grin, "There is definitely a chance at I will be in bed in an hour."

His dad didn't believe him, but in the end he just rubbed his hand over Stiles' head, cupped the back of his skull in his big square palm and said, "Don't stay up too late," and left, and an hour later, Stiles stabbed his needle back into it's cushion and went and sat down in bed and counted out five minutes before going back downstairs.

—

People moseyed along in a reality-tangential way through the end of January. After the holidays, Lydia went back to Miss Morrell's and Allison to the candy shop, and Stiles did number of repair jobs for the royal army, holes, ripped seams. They were all clean, but when Stiles poked a pinky through a bullet hole on a lapel or a back panel, he could imagine the underlying wound, and felt a little sick.

The soldier who brought in the newest uniform was still alive, but he limped something fierce and needed a cane, and his eyes didn’t quite focus on Stiles when he passed his bundle over the counter ("Well you'll just have to keep him safer next time," he told it later). After that it was five or six commissions to patch on more of those fake charms onto lapels and chest panels and pockets, and then a job to make an entire dress out of them. In ordinary circumstances Stiles would have refused on principle of it being too goddamn stupid for existence, but he pasted on a smile and did it anyway. The tall, vulture-nosed lady that wanted it had a quarry-deep trust fund and high-end ideas about the cost of something being proportional to the quality and Stiles could happily overcharge her without feeling guilty about it.

"You're going to regret this," Lydia warned him when she found out about it,

"Yes, thank you, I already do," Stiles said, hauling in the box of cut-outs that had been left on the stoop that morning into the back, but he was lying, because it wasn't until the third unending day of stitching the swatches together into usable panels that he truly understood the torrential agony of regret.

By the end of it he upped the labor cost twice and said to the scalloped hem one bitter night, “You could do the decent thing and actually work," since it was February and people were wearing summer weight like it was July. Coincidently enough, a week later there was a snowstorm, which lasted three days and left a hefty, sticky deposit on the eaves and built up on the less tread sidewalks for almost six weeks. It got him a trickle of customers and ire from Lydia, who blamed him for how the cookie crumbled, and into April without too much of a fuss or a strain on the books.

Once the snow started to melt in earnest and flooded the curbs and splashed everything a murky, dirty brown, Stiles had to call a locksmith about the deadbolt. It was mostly a waste; the guy sanded and refitted the plate and fiddled with the six-generations-and-a-cat's-age old iron lock, and got nothing out of it. He smelled bad and charged Stiles for it, but no matter what he did it still wouldn't turn when the door was closed as it did when it was open.

"But you didn't fix it," Stiles muttered, but handed over the money.

After he left and Stiles went down to beg for supplies down at the lumber yard, he said, “Don’t ask,” to his dad, who was leaning on the counter by the register in casual slacks, a frumpy blue sweater, worn and faded at the elbows and a soft, fond expression on his face.

“I wasn’t going to," he said, but he eyed the long stretch of dark, walnut Stiles laid down on the floor of the shop with nosy curiosity, and poked and gave pointers and rallied the girls into adding to the laugh track as Stiles fought to nail the brackets level on the side of the door.

"Help or shut up," Stiles said, grumpy, which sent the girls away in laughter and his dad saying, “Keep up the good work,” and fleeing up the stairs to the house.

"Cowards," he muttered, and turned back to the fittings.

In the end, he couldn't get it level, but it did its job: it kept the door closed and more importantly kept people out.

"But what if there's a fire?" his dad said, eyeing it suspiciously now that had sprung into reality as an actual object and wasn't just a hair-brained side project soon forgotten. "What if you can't get out of the house, what if the girls can't get it?"

"Same as if they didn't have a key, I guess," Stiles said, and added, "And they can still use the back door," because that hadn't broken fortunately, and he'd be able to hear them knocking at any rate. "If you think about it this is safer than a flimsy little bolt. There's no way someone's busting through here," and he whacked the heel of his fist down on the bar to prove it and then yelped because it hurt.

His dad hummed, clearly wary, but let it go.

—

Stiles got a letter from Allison on May Day— _Stop being a recluse and come visit me_ —and when he looked around the room, saw the haystack piles and paint-splat colors of all his fabrics and pattern pieces looming up on tables like rickety mountains waiting for the quake, funneling wide from the doorway to the rectangle space of his work station, he decided to take a break.

He took the rattrap alleys behind Miss Shelly’s Creamery down through Third past his favorite curry place to avoid the parade, and then blamed the brilliant daytime-fireworks, the distracting sunburst roses of color he could just see over the curling eaves of the rooftops above on the fact that he didn't notice the small band of stringy looking thugs until he ran full tilt into them, and sent one with a purple and _fleur-de-lis_ bandana to the ground with and grunt.

The others rounded on him, one had a knife.

“Crap,” he said. 

He recognized them from the Sheriff’s station, locked up in the holding cells, and he was pretty sure they knew who he was too. He turned and booked it down an adjacent alley. He was pretty fast, but he didn't know the area very well and wasn't too surprised when he ran full tilt into a dead end. Great, there was even a dumpster for them to hide his body and everything.

“Hey guys,” he said. He turned around, taking a great gulp of breath and clutching at his stitchy side. There were four of them, now; the purple one and three other primary colors: blue, red and yellow.

“I know you,” said one, blue bandana with a pig-ugly sneer on his jowly face. “Sheriff’s kid. Got Jimmy arrested.”

“What, no, hold on,” Stiles said, the same time red bandana said, “Thought Jimmy ran off with Andre.”

“Nah,” said Blue, shaking his head. “Broke into the old Wernicke place up in the Heights, got locked up.”

“Who’d Andre run off with then?” said Purple.

“Some asshole,” said yellow bandana, with a quick sneer. “Don’t deserve him—Hey, don’t you move,” with a quick jab with the pointy end of his knife at Stiles. "I'll cut you."

"Okay, sure," Stiles said and retreated back to the brick wall, "That's fair."

"What's the sheriff's kid doing out here?" asked Blue, half at Stiles, and squinted at him unattractively, "You spying on us?"

"What? No, of course not,” Stiles said.

"I think you are," said Yellow.

“Look, I’m sorry I bumped into you, shouldn’t have done that, or ran away. I’m just going to see a—friend. No harm done. I'll be gone in like five seconds, seriously, just out admiring the parade.”

"From the alley?" said Red, doubtfully.

"Yes," said Stiles, "Less crowded.”

Yellow shrugged and said, "That's what we were doing," to the others, with an expression on his face that suggested to Stiles that he didn't want to be here and only was out of solidarity.

"Don't encourage him," said Purple, and then gave up and shrugged. "Look whatever, I want a churro let's just get this over with—"

He was interrupted when he was shoved into the wall, and then lifted off the ground. Purple screamed and then his lips stuck together like with glue or stitches. His lips pulled taut as he silently screamed and thrashed his legs like he was being held in a giant invisible hand.

They all stared at him.

"Well that was unexpected," Stiles said, and then another man, at the mouth of the alley said, "I've been looking for you everywhere," and they all turned to him.

He had black hair and a respectable, cropped-short beard, light eyes: green eyes, or maybe hazel; Stiles couldn't tell from the distance. He had an arm stretched out toward Purple like he was holding an imaginary torch, and he was dressed all in buccaneer black with lace trim cinching his billowing sleeves tight at the wrists, the only color his sleek blue and silver, diamond-checked waistcoat. Stiles respected a fine suit, but was pretty sure this guy was a scoundrel. Wizard, he amended, looking at the still floating Purple.

“Coming?” said the wizard, looking at Stiles intently.

Stiles nodded hesitantly but said, "Oh, yeah, glad you found me.”

To the other thugs the wizard said, "Get out of here," and Purple fell to his ass on the ground and all four of them took off with nary a hasty glance over their shoulders. Once they were well out of sight, the wizard started walking away.

“Hey wait,” Stiles said, and ran to catch up. "Thanks for that, I thought it was getting a beating for sure. Can I buy you a drink? There's this place just down the street—" Actually he didn't know where they were; if he had to guess—8th?

“I’m being followed,” the wizard said, non-sequitur, looking straight ahead. “You should leave.”

Stiles looked around; the alley was empty. "By who?"

"A bad person," the wizard said.

"Who wants to hurt you?" Stiles guessed. "So you stopped to fist the rainbow squad? What are you dumb?"

The wizard eyed him. "Well I'm regretting it now."

"So you'd just leave me to die!" Stiles demanded, grinning. "Don't you wizards have some kind of code? 'A friend in need is a friend indeed'? Don't look at me like that, _I’m_ not a wizard. I thought you were supposed to help people."

"Not me," said the wizard unhelpfully.

"Well then what kind of wizard are you?" he said, and grumbled under his breath.

"A dumb one," the wizard said with a straight face.

“Wow you’re funny,” Stiles said earnestly, rolled his eyes, and went silent. They walked together for a long minute until Stiles thought—yes, there, that’s the old cobbler’s shop—he could smell the stink of black shoe polish. If he took a right and headed out into the street he might—

“Never mind it’s too late,” the wizard said, appearing at Stiles’ side. All at once he grabbed Stiles’ hand and tugged him into an adjacent alley and set them off at a strict pace. “Don’t look back.”

Stiles looked back at once. “Why—oh.”

They were two or three strange looking men oozing around a corner a good thirty paces behind them. Literally oozing since they seemed to be made out of ink or sticky black slime, and dripping out of their too-tight green and red conductor uniforms, leaving mucky footprints over the cobbles.

Stiles turned back around. “Oh wow, that's gross. Holy shit, what are those? I think I'm going to barf.”

“I told you not to look,” the wizard said with a shrug.

“I don’t listen well,” Stiles said absently. “What did you do to piss them off? Are we going to die?”

“Who knows,” he said, in a way that told Stiles he was lying. “Sorry, looked like they got ahead of me.”

Two more goo monsters had popped up to block the path, arms stretched up, up, up into the eaves, a couple bubbling limbs blooming out of where their ribs should be to stick to the walls; it looked like snot in a handkerchief. The wizard tugged him down a third alley and they broke into a run, and Stiles recognized where they were being funneled to—down toward the train station, which would throw a dead end at them at some point. Stiles could hear horrible squelching noises from a little ways over his shoulder—meaty like a butcher digging around to scoop out all the unusable bits out of a pig.

The next corner wasn't a dead end, but it was blocked off by more monsters.

"Wow, my day is going great," Stiles said, somewhat choked and furious.

“You’re telling me,” the wizard said, and, “Close your eyes,” a little urgently as the monsters start to converge.

"I don't want to do that," Stiles said; not knowing was always worse, but he took a deep breath and did it anyway.

He started counting off steps in his head, visualizing the minute the monsters hit. How much excruciating pain he was going to be in? He wondered if they'd melt him, like acid, or if he'd be absorbed into some kind of mucus hive-mind. Then he said, "Next time just leave me to get beaten up," but the wizard didn't say anything.

They were walking at a brisk pace now, so he couldn't imagine it would take very long. When he felt a swiping pressure at his pant cuff, he assumed that was the end of it, goodbye cruel world. But then there was an odd sucking sound of a great deal of water crashing together, and when he opened his eyes next and looked down there was fifty feet of air between him and a large sticky blast radius, twig like hand reaching for them but missing by hairs. His feet insisted he was walking on stone, but his eyes disagreed.

“Holy—!” He panicked and clamped down on the wizard's hand, which dug his heavy ring—a thick silver band with a dewdrop sapphire—uncomfortably into Stiles’ palm.

“Calm down,” the wizard said, voice mild.

“Uh no!” Stiles threw his free arm around the wizard’s neck, and then the other once he had a grip, and then when the wizard tried to pry him off, Stiles threatened, “I will make this very embarrassing for both of us!”

“Fine,” the wizard said in a gruff voice, and backed off. Instead of letting him fall to his death, he wrapped an arm around Stiles’ back. “Just walk. You’re fine.”

“This is the exact opposite of fine,” Stiles said, but he gingerly started pumping his legs again to see what would happen. It turned out to be the return of the discomfiting feeling of solid, invisible ground beneath his feet.

“There, is that so bad?"

"Yes," Stiles snarled.

"You're fine," the wizard insisted again.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Stiles said, and looked down, and got distracted.

They were heading towards Central Square, over the clustered crowds plaquing the sidewalks, cheering on the parade floats winding up through Main Street, trickling down the side roads in and out of the taverns and advertised storefronts. He missed the last three May Day parades.

This one was for the army, celebrating all the baby recruits, the vets, going off to do battle; it was massive, probably two thousand people. Some were draped over tank cannon barrels like brightly colored ribbons and dancing along to the brass horn accompaniment following behind a large paper mache float of a roaring lion, back arched and jaws open to the sky—the royal crest. He looked around to see if anyone had spotted them yet, round faces turned up to watch them prance their way through the sky, but people either didn't take the time to look up of they were invisible. A wizard could do that, he thought.

“Wow,” Stiles said.

One of the massive, red-and-gold speckled balloons hovering over the marching band burst into a shower of rose petals. The crowd swelled with cheer and set off a chain reaction of all the other balloons, and for a few minutes Stiles couldn't see the street through the mess of it. Halfway to the ground, all the petals dissolved into glitter, back-splashing like hot oil drops but pleasant to the touch when he reached out to catch one, like warm sparkly rain skittering across his palm.

“That’s new,” he said, delighted, “How did they do that? I don't remember it ever being like this." On the other hand, it was the first May Day since the start of the war; people needed a reason to celebrate.

"Some kind of emulsion spell," the wizard said absently, searching the ground, and Stiles looked at him, surprised; he hadn't expected an answer. “Where can I drop you off?”

After a minute of searching Stiles spotted the butterscotch-yellow, curlicue sign of Camilla’s Candy down next to Cesari's, and pointed it out. Then tried not to fall on his ass climbing onto the third store balcony once they got there.

The wizard watched, perched delicately on the railing.

“Try not to get into more trouble,” he said, once Stiles has finished dusting off his shirt, running his hands through his hair.

"That was _your_ , trouble!" Stiles said at once, but the wizard was already tipping back over the railing.

He was nowhere to be seen on the ground below once Stiles leaped forward to check. But now he was getting funny looked from some of the paraders. Then someone started gesturing about seeing him walking through the air.

“Huh,” Stiles said, and fled inside.

—

“You met a wizard?” Allison said doubtfully after he'd stumbled down the stairs in a bit of a disgruntled haze and extracted her from behind the counter to recount his harrowing ordeal. "Was it Wizard Hale?"

“Who knows,” Stiles said around a mouthful of cake, “Doubt it,” licking at the thick sugary frosting and sticky blue fondant. At her disbelieving look he added defensively, “He didn’t seem evil enough.”

She rolled her eyes. “Because that’s how it works,” she agreed.

It could have been him though; rumors of his reappearance had started popping up again. Some banker's second cousin supposedly had her heart eaten the beginning of April. Chester Underhill apparently stole Hale's coin purse during a maypole dance and found a whole collection of stolen souls inside instead of money. Add to that, a castle had been spotted roaming around in the wilds, belching smearing black smoke and scaring the sheep hands. Stiles thought evil wizards ought to look evil, though. It was only fair.

“You look like crap, by the way,” Allison added, face serene.

“Thanks,” Stiles said, mildly. “That’s really nice. I'm glad I came all this way to see you.”

“Me too,” she said brightly. “When's the last time you slept?"

"Last year," Stiles said, snotty, and Allison nodded sagely and said, "It shows."

The petticoat underneath was too long and so the hem of her sweetheart dress rode up. She tugged at it a little and then stopped with a huff of annoyance and started playing with her hair in that absent way people do when they were thinking about something else.

He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "You haven’t met any strange wizards right?”

She gave him a dangerous look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What? Nothing, obviously, ha ha ha,” he said quickly. "I just worry sometimes. Hey, got anymore chocolate raisins?"

Aware of his bullshit, Allison rolled her eyes and got up to get them more snacks and then a glass of fresh press lemonade, each, and they sat huddled in the back corner of the storage room, sitting on crates of canvas bags full of sugar, and Stiles was dutifully silent while Allison, expounded, at length, about her coworkers at work, her coworkers at home, her coworkers' betting pools. She was banned from them.

“What did you do?” Stiles laughed.

“If they can’t stand to lose,” she said, prim.

Before her apprenticeship, she'd been in school for accounting, had a talent for it, the economy, that rivaled Lydia's affair with the theoreticals. Even though Stiles was always half convinced they'd wake up one day to Allison running away to join the circus, or the army. 

"Oh yeah, that reminds me," Allison was saying, and dug into the pocket of her frilled apron to set a small leather bag of coins in Stiles' open palm.

"Hey, no—" Stiles started, but Allison already had that look on her face, and said, "That was the whole point of apprenticing us out right? Just take it."

Stiles didn't want to take it. It was bad enough they'd had to take them out of school. Lydia might be enjoying learning magic now—Miss Morrell was a witch of high standing with the King—but she hadn't in the beginning. Allison had worked for her money, and he shouldn't need to take their money at all, which just made him think that he wasn't working hard enough.

He looked at her smiling, expectant face, and closed his hand around it, shoved it in his pocket. "Thanks."

Later, when Stiles got up, stretching and getting ready to leave, she asked, "Don't you ever want to do anything else?"

"Not really," he said. Before his mom died and willed him the shop, he thought about being a knight, but he had no measurable skill with a sword or spear and his dad couldn't sew, and the girls wanted something more. Someone needed to take care of the shop.

"You could do anything," Allison insisted, and shoved a goody bag in his hands. "You don't need to stay there for the rest of your life. You can sell it."

He didn't know how to say, _Sometimes I feel like she’s still around when I work here_ without worrying her, so he said, “I know, it’s fine,” and kissed her on the cheek and let her escort him to the front door, which was less crowded, now that the majority of the parade had moved on.

His goody bag was full of treats—caramel drops, chocolate squares, sticky marzipan oranges and bananas and strawberries, pulled toffee, cake with heavy, sugary fondant. When he got home, he left a couple things for Dad on the kitchen table and hid the rest in an old decorative crockpot. He didn't see the wizard at all on the way back and couldn't decide if that was disappointing or not. In the end, he thought it was probably for the best.

—

He looked up when he heard the front bell ring. He checked the window—he'd worked until dawn before, only realizing it when his eyes weren't straining so hard in the candlelight, but it was twilight out, a rich royal purple hemming in a rosy pink wink of the horizon, the heavy darkness dotted here and there with a lonely window light, or a tall-standing streetlamp. When he pushed open the door to the shop there was a tall black man and a thin white woman hovering in the doorway.

“We’re closed,” he said, and gestured to the window. “There’s a sign. I must have forgotten to bar the door.” He hadn’t, but it made people leave faster.

She said, in a conversational way, “I saw you with him,” like he’d said something else entirely.

She was wearing a silky black dress like she’d been poured into it, a hat with a wide, swooping brim that hid her upper face but not the lush red slash of her mouth. The man looked frightened, eyes wide but not tracking, staring at something over Stiles’ shoulder and trembling, his shaved head shiny with sweat.

Getting irritated now, Stiles said, “I don't know what you're talking about. Who are you?"

“His tastes have suffered,” she said, ignoring him and looking around, at the mannequins in the window, the little blue dress for a kid whose parents hadn't had the money, in the end, then at him. She looked him up and down, an expression like she found him to be a nasty piece of garbage. “I mean honestly.”

Stiles crossed his arms. “Well, since we’re closed and everything maybe you should just get out and then you wouldn't have to worry about it.”

“Cheeky,” she said. She got up in his face. She smelled strange, too sweet like overripe clementines, too strong, like it was covering something up. “I like it. But you shouldn’t talk to me like that.”

“Funny how we all can’t have things we want,” he said. She smiled like he has done something hilarious, with all of her straight white teeth. Something was wrong. “Like I said, we’re closed.”

“I want you to send him a message,” she said, voice dipping low, rough and violent, and ran a black lacquered nail down his cheek. He was missing half of this conversation, but when he got a good look at her eyes there wasn’t much else he needed to know: they were shiny with magic. “Tell him he'll regret running from me. Tell him I'm coming. Tell him I'll have his heart, and it's going to hurt, and I won't stop.”

Stiles slapped her hand away—too late—and felt something crawling over his scalp like tar, sticky and boiling as it ran down the back of his neck and then around to the front of his throat, sliding over his collar bone and scratching at his chest on the way down. He rubbed at his arms but there was nothing there, and it didn't go away.

“What did you do?” he demanded, patting desperately at his skin, his head, his neck, trying to wipe it off even though there was nothing tangible.

“You won't be able to tell anyone about that,” she said, now on the other side of the room, picking up and discarding scarves before selecting a sleek red silk shawl and draping it casually around her shoulders. “Have a little fun with it though.”

“What did you _do_?” Stiles repeated. His voice was a wretched sandy rasp, now, dragging out of his throat like gravel. Everything had gone blurry, the paint running, melting—he was dying, he must be. He stumbled, caught himself on the edge of the counter, and felt desperately weak and fragile. The man was staring at him, a look of horror on his slack face, but when the woman snapped her fingers, he spun around, limbs stiff like a wooden doll, teetering on brittle tethers.

"Give Derek my love," she said, and ignored him when he rasped out, "I don't know who that is," just swept out the door with a swish of her skirts, the man after her. The door closed with a snick and left Stiles alone.

The sticky feeling drained off of his skin once they were gone, leaving behind a hollow space in his diaphragm that started filling up with something suffocating. He couldn't seem to stand up straight, and his whole body trembled and wobbled and just didn't work right as he shuffled over to the viewing area, the three-sided mirror. When he got a look at his face, he had to sit down on the measurement pedestal. His knees creaked and his back cracked and his hips cricked and he couldn't breathe very well so he concentrated away from it—the soft wood under his hands was worn down by decades of leather soles and ladies’ heels, soft; the smell of daffodils in the vase.

Stiles never met his grandfather, who died happily at fifty on his fishing boat, and was set out to sea in a dingy with a bottle of whisky and his favorite fishing rod. There were a couple of hand-sized, black-and-white sketches of him pressed in between the pages of an old journal in a closet somewhere, toothy and wrinkly and sun-browned. The face that looked out of the mirror at Stiles then looked a lot like those sketches, only older and unhappy. His skin was leathery and sagging when he touched his cheek, pale and thin and crinkly.

“Shit,” he said.

That was the Witch of the Waste, he realized; he was sure of it. There was only one witch that powerful around these parts. _My family is in danger_ , he thought next, and stood up. He hobbled first to the front door, knees spiking with bitter, grinding pain—the bar was almost too heavy to lift—and then into the workshop. She came here for a reason—Derek, whom he didn't know personally, but thought—the wizard. Hale or whatever his name was, if Allison was right. She was looking for Hale; she might come back and do something worse to his dad or the girls.

He wondered what to do. If his dad found out, he'd want to start an investigation or lobby the local magister to get an audience with the king. It wouldn't really matter, that last one; the great Wizard Boyd had gone missing around the same time as Prince Danny, a little before. He couldn’t think of anyone powerful enough a rival. And Stiles had a feeling if he didn't leave right away, the Witch of the Waste would come back and do something worse, or track down his family and hurt them.

So there was nothing to do about it.

There was enough money in the safe for a month. Two, if his dad stretched it out.

 _Going to Porthaven_ , he wrote on a scrap of paper and left it on the kitchen table. _Back when I can_.

—

He took Lionel down to Rosewood and then the roundabout that lead out into the hillside where he'd spotted the billowing column of smoke out in the rushes earlier that day, and by the time full darkness had fallen an hour later, smothering out the complement of daytime noises, Stiles was wheezing and sweating and shaking and not even half as far as he'd hoped to be. When a farmer, clopping along in a mule pulled flat bed of baled hay, called out, "Hey, grandpa, you doin' all right?" Stiles, irritated beyond reason, snapped, "I'm not a grandpa!" and stomped his foot like a child.

The man blinked at him, just visible in the cast off light of the rising full moon, and said, "Sorry, sir, didn't mean no offense, just wonderin' what your doin' out here this late, is all."

"Taking a walk," Stiles said, viciously, and kicked at a rock, which had the double effect of shooting out into a bush and scaring a family of rabbits, and hurting Stiles' foot. "I'm allowed to do that. I'm not an invalid!" He should have brought a cane. How did old people do this all day? He felt like he was about to fall apart. Although this did answer a number of old questions for him about why very old people always seemed so very angry. There wasn't any time to suffer idiots when your back felt like it was about to break.

"I can see that, sir," the man said, gentle, patient. "Just thought maybe I'd offer a lift, to get you a little ways to where you're going."

Stiles paused, and then felt a swooping sense of shame. He was being unreasonable. No need to take it out on strangers. "Thank you," he said, "I think I will," and let himself be helped up into the front bench.

He ate a little cheese from his satchel and some crackers, and quietly caught his breath while the farmer chatted. He didn’t seem concerned that Stiles didn’t have anything to say—just needed someone to listen.

"So where're you headed, sir?" he said after a while, once the conversation had drifted off into comfortable, swaying silence. They were nearing a squat cobble cottage with the lights on in its quarter paned windows. There was a pen fenced in at one side and Stiles caught the faint animal stink of livestock. His body may be falling apart, now, but at least he still had his senses.

"Hale's castle," Stiles said, looking for it now.

The man went very pale and very surprised. His mules brayed as he pulled to tight on the reins. "Beg your pardon?"

"Hale's castle," Stiles repeated, and held his cloak tighter around himself; he was so goddamn cold. It was May! "It's been spotted around here, right? That's where I'm going."

"That's awfully brave of you, sir," he said, although the expression on his face quite clearly said he thought Stiles was an idiot. "I hear the Wizard Howl is pretty dangerous. Don't suppose I can say anything to convince you off it."

"No," Stiles agreed. "I'll be fine."

The farmer let him off and had him wait long enough to fetch a cane from the cottage—simple birch with a bird head handle—which Stiles took with an enormous amount of gratitude, and set off, into the swelling green hill, which were much rockier and steeper up close than they had been looking at them from his window, and much harder to climb, now that he was approximately five thousand years old and made of paper mache left to crisp in the sun.

"Wonderful," Stiles said.

—

The moon was high overhead by the time he realized just how much trouble he was in—he couldn't even see the smoke stack anymore! And he was lost! This was the worst day of his life.

"Well that's just great," he said and then yelled, "I hope you're happy you miserable asshole! I'm going to be like this forever because of you!"

Forever would amount to what, a year? Two? He didn't know how old he was, but he felt ancient and brittle, like tinder and fallen, dried up leaves. He couldn't have long, and he paid for his outburst with a coughing fit that wracked his entire body and possibly expelled a lung. He had to sit down on a rock to catch his breath. He hoped he didn't get pneumonia or tuberculosis although he wouldn't be surprised. Misfortune came in escalating thirds and although he couldn't imagine what could be worse than almost being killed by slime monsters, or being turned into an old man, it was bound to happen, and when it did, he was probably _still_ going to be surprised by it.

He heard something rustling in the bushes as he sat there. It sounded large, and was making a wretched screaming noise from twenty or thirty feet in the direction he was going. He debated investigating—it would serve him right, being eaten by a mountain lion. But whatever it was—some kind of animal at the very least—sounded in pain, and he thought it might be caught in a trap, and he was bitter and old now so he could release it and ruin someone else's day for a change and not really care about it.

It wasn't an animal—or, it was, but it wasn't a trap, at least not a purposeful one. There was some kind of rough hewn pole sticking out of a large, shoulder height thistle bush, and when he freed it, it turned out to be a ratty, patchy scarecrow with a molding turnip for a head, a battered silk top hat atop it. For one brief moment he wondered what was making the racket, and then a panicky jackrabbit burst from behind the flap of its cheap suit jacket and bounded away down the road and into the bushes.

"Well!" Stiles said, heart jack-rabbiting itself. He righted the scarecrow and put both of his skeletal hands on his knees, and stared at the thick twisty veins and liver spots until he calmed down. "That was a neat trick," he said, straightening, "Scaring people. It was probably your own fault, you realize, getting it stuck there. It was after your head."

The scarecrow looked as if it was listening; but that was surely a trick of the light. Or paranoia.

"Right," he said. "Well you keep doing what you're doing, or go back to your field. Go on an adventure if you like. I don't care," he added, and left.

Over the next hill, he crowed with triumph—there it was! Hale's castle.

It was billowing thick black smoke, but was stationary and tucked into a thick field of baby's breath near the tree line of the forest. Up close it was very ugly. It looked as if it had clawed its way sentient from an industrial scrap yard and then set on fire. The top half was made of two or three quarter sections of very different buildings, red brick and white plaster siding and heavy stone blocks for the long willowy towers, thick steel panels riveted at the joints to glue it all together. The front half looked like the gaping muzzle of a great beast, with a pointed nose and long rusting teeth. The round belly was covered in square, overlapping panels of steel and copper and iron. There were four gangly legs splayed out at odd angles and holding the whole thing up; they looked like they belonged on a chicken.

Stiles stared at it.

There was only the one door, hanging like a stick-out belly button from the middle of the undercarriage. It had a single step stoop and when Stiles tried to touch the doorknob the whole castle lurched away from him with a shrill shriek of grinding metal and the reverberating stomps of its legs. 

"Hey!" he yelled, raspy, struggling to run after it. He probably looked ridiculous, hobbling like that. He rapped the tip of his cane on the door. "Come back here! You stop that right now! Stop! Stop, I said!"

Miraculously, it did. It walked ten more steps and then slowed to a halt to settle down with a recognizable petulance on top of a bush of wild flowers. Stiles cautiously tried the knob, but it was locked.

"I'm not leaving until you open up!" he said, and rapped his cane on the wood again, and then kept doing it out of querulous impatience. "I need to talk to Hale! I can wait out here forever, so you might as well just give up." When that didn't do anything, he said, "I'm an old man! Are you going to leave me out here to die! I'll haunt you! I'll die all over this stoop. It'll smell bad! What will the neighbors think? _Goddamn it open up_!"

The door swung reluctantly open. "Finally," he muttered, and climbed in. The door slammed shut behind him, and the swaying feeling that he had felt on the steps disappeared. It was very dusty and dirty and dank when he made it to the landing. There was a small fire in a large semi-circular stone hearth to the left, almost smothered in a large mound of ash. He sneezed twice just looking at it. Other than that, there was a cozy kitchen nook with a sturdy looking oak table and five arts and crafts chairs to the right, a number of mismatched curios gathering dust and webs and trash in the corners, and a blue glass mosaic in curling in a tidal pool pattern around a large sink with dirty finishings. There was no counter space that wasn't covered in books or papers or used napkins or bits of mangled flowers or dirty dishes.

"I feel saved already," he muttered, creaking over to the plush armchair by the fire. He was suddenly achingly bone weary and needed to sit down. "What does she see in this guy anyway?"

"That's what I'd like to know," came a voice. Stiles was too tired to be frightened, so he just sat down and looked around.

"Who said that?" he asked. It didn't sound like Hale. He thought he lived alone.

"Me," said the voice, and a head popped out of the fire. It was either made of fire, or was the fire; either way, Stiles didn't like it.

"Who's 'me'? Are you a demon?"

"Jackson," he said, and looked please. "I'm a very powerful fire demon."

"Are you sure?" Stiles said doubtfully. He could have sworn they were more impressive than this. "Shouldn't you have horns, and be out razing villages or setting cats on fire. You look like you're strong enough to boil water."

The hearth grumbled and shook, and Jackson rose from the crackling logs as a naked human torso, also made of fire, and two arms, and slammed his fists down on the stone, turning a poisonous looking green, and said, "I can torch you where you sit old man, don't think I won't!"

"Okay," Stiles said, and made a placating gesture with one weathered hand; it worked on his more stubborn and obnoxious and irritating customers since it made them feel more important than him, the deference. Jackson settled down. "I was just making an observation. Anyway, _great fire demon_ , can you boil some water for me?" He could use a hot water bottle for his back, or maybe some tea, if he could find some. Or a clean cup, which was unlikely.

"No," said Jackson petulantly. He sunk back down into the embers until only his eyes showed above the pitted corpse of the log. "Boil your own water."

Stiles rolled his eyes. "Fine. Can you tell me where Hale is," Stiles said, and then yawned. "I need to talk to him."

"He's not here," Jackson said, and then added, snotty, "And he can't help you."

"No?" Stiles asked warily. He couldn't remember—was it demons or fairies that lied to you; both, he decided. "Why not!"

"He just can't," Jackson said, "Not what you're under."

"And you know all about it then," Stiles snapped, and leaned forward, which made something in his back crack and twinge.

"I'm a _demon,"_ Jackson said, proud. "I know everything. Like how you can't talk about it."

The Witch of the Waste has said that as well, back at the shop, so he tried to say _The Witch of the Waste made me old,_ and got about as far as the 'the' before the curious sensation of his mouth sealing shut interrupted him. When he felt his face, he discovered a smooth uninterrupted patch of skin where his mouth should be.

"Mmm, mhmm!" said Stiles.

"Ha, told you," said Jackson. His fiery teeth were extra bright—more than the rest of him. Stiles supposed he wasn't surprised, the sleek muscles on Jackson's arms and belly were probably only for show too.

"Well then you can help me," Stiles said, when he stopped trying to explain and his mouth came back. "Since you know all about it."

Jackson frowned, with a caught expression on his face.

"You said you could help!" Stiles said.

"No, I didn't, I said I _knew_ what was wrong with you. Don't put words in my mouth."

"Then you know who I need to talk to," Stiles prompted.

"Maybe I do, maybe I don't," Jackson said, snide. "Maybe I don't want to help you."

Stiles pulled himself out of the chair with effort; his arms and legs were shaking, and these old bones of his felt about to quit, but he said, "Fine," and started toward the staircase opposite the one leading to the door. "I'll just go talk to Hale, then, shall I? Since you're useless. Are you sure he's not here? I think I'll just check. Which door is his?"

He gave it ten seconds.

Three. "Hey. Hey! Wait a second," Stiles stopped but didn't turn back. There was a long stretch of reluctant silence, but when Stiles put a foot on the stairs, Jackson made a painfully dramatic noise and said, "I can help you. But not right now. I'll need you to do something for me first."

"Wow, I'm _so_ surprised." He made his way slowly and painfully back to the fire and the chair. "What is it? I'm not killing anyone. And you can't have my soul."

Jackson made a disgusted noise. "Like I'd want it. It's probably old and rotten."

"Give you a stomach ache," Stiles agreed. "Come on, out with it, I don't have forever."

"I can see that," Jackson grumbled. "I need you to help break the contract I have with Hale. I hate this place and I want to leave. I've been stuck in this fireplace for ten years! I'm practically a slave. Do you know how humiliating that is?"

"Sure," Stiles said slowly; this sounded like a very bad idea. "What do I have to do?"

"I can't tell you," Jackson said. He sounded embarrassed as he said it. "I'm not allowed, you'll have to figure it out for yourself."

"Wow, this is very blind leading the blind off a cliff." Stiles spotted a knitted throw shoved in between a cracked pottery jug and two copies of _Jenkins Household Cleaning Remedies_ written in pressed gold leaf along the spine sitting an antique blue curio. The books looked battered and worn along the edges, but the spines weren't cracked at all—Stiles couldn't say he was surprised since he'd functionally walked into a large garbage can. He grabbed the throw and retreated to the chair.

"I could take your eyes if you wanted," Jackson said, with a hopeful expression flickering across his square face. His hair grew an inch or two with excitement. "Hale doesn't give me any eyes or hearts or hair anymore. It might work."

"No!" Stiles said. "But I'll take your deal. As long as I have your word you'll break my curse after. That's how it works right? I remember that much."

Jackson, clearly grumpy, so swore and with that, Stiles fell asleep.

—

Stiles dreamt he was ten again and that his mother was still alive—

_“Talk to them a little.”_

_“They don’t talk back.”_

_“Well how do you know if you never try?”_

—then of his sisters' adoption and his mother’s death, and then all of those things with everyone morphing into those horrible gooey monsters. Before it became too awful, he startled awake. There were three curious faces peering at him from beyond the paisley winged cushions of the chair: blond hair, black hair, and Jackson.

Stiles yelled and lashed out with his cane and hit the curly blond on the right. They both yelled as well and darted away, and a voice that wasn't either of them and also female shouted, muffled, from somewhere upstairs.

"What!?"

"There's an old person here!" the blonde yelled back, clutching his forehead, where a shiny red mark.

"Gross!" yelled the girl. She sounded like she was getting closer; a steady clomp on the stairs. "Is it alive?"

"Yeah!" Blonde said, scowling. "And it bites!"

"I do not," Stiles protested.

"Does it smell?" the girl appeared, on the top of the stairs; long blonde waves, swirling brown cloak—they were all wearing cloaks—and an unlaced tunic, and Stiles indignantly shouted, "No!" at the same time as Curly said, lips curled, "Yes, like _old person_ ," and then it became very chaotic with a great deal of shouting. He's an intruder! I'm a guest! He's a thief! Old people don't _steal._ Stiles was very good at shouting, generally speaking. Except after a number of long, loud minutes, Curly said, urgent, " _Scott_ , he's not breathing," and the other young man—Scott, then— _was_ breathing, so that was a ridiculous thing to say, which was when Stiles realized that there was a terrible pain radiating out like a tremor from his chest, and everything had become very blurry, and he was suddenly very dizzy.

Scott guided him gently to the armchair and had him sit down, and then bullied Jackson, who looked faintly disgusted and alarmed by the failing organics, into heating water by shoving a battered metal kettle right into the coals, and Stiles sat, horrified by his reaction, until his heart rate slowed down.

"This is good," he said finally, gesturing with his mug. He'd always liked lemon tea. "Thank you."

"Are you sure you're okay?" asked Scott. Stiles already liked this one the best. He didn't seem like a shit. "Do you have a heart condition? Do you need to see a doctor? Can I get you anything else?"

Stiles opened his mouth to refuse, but the girl, having gravitated closer during the fuss, cut him off with a quick, "He's _fine._ If he was going to die he'd've done it already."

"Erica!" Scott said. Stiles had a name for the face, at least. "Don't be so rude!"

" _I'm_ being rude? He _broke in._ He's _trespassing._ " She didn't seem overly concerned about it—she did live with Wizard Hale, perhaps there _wasn't_ anything for her to worry about—and her voice upon saying it was bored, sublimating curiosity. She eyed him. "How _did_ you get in?"

"That's easy enough," Stiles said, and gestured with his chin at the hearth. "Jackson let me in."

Jackson, who'd been warily hiding from all the commotion and pouting from the kettle, erupted from his little log hut, and shouted, "I did not! He broke in. I had nothing to do with it!" but Stiles just said over him, conspiratorial, "He didn't want to tell you, but he's disgusted by how dirty is it in here so he hired me to take care of the place," and Jackson said, " _Hired?"_ and Stiles narrowed his eyes at him and said, "Yes, you're paying me for a service," and Jackson, apparently a margin smarter than Stiles gave him the benefit of, grumbled, "Yeah, I guess, something like that," and retreated.

"Oh, well if he's just a cleaning lady," Erica said, and, apparently losing interest in him, snapped her fingers at Curly and said, "Let's go," and picked her way over a heap of dirty washcloths and then down the stairs. She fiddled with something out of view and the orange wedge of the window over the door brightened considerably. Stiles craned his neck around the lip of the chair and thought he could see the ocean through it, which was impossible; they were in the middle of the country. "And don't go into my room," Erica said finally, and let in a breath of salty air and swirled away with Isaac at her towering boot heels.

"Get food!" Scott yelled at them, and then after an awkward half minute of silence where Stiles sat quietly and Scott stood quietly and Jackson glowered at the wall quietly, Scott said, "Are you hungry?" and cleared two little swatches of the cluttered kitchen table so they could sit and eat soggy cheese sandwiches on crunchy, half-stale sourdough.

"It really is disgusting in here," Stiles said, fighting down another bite; he was old, but he hadn't lost the texture sensitivity. He picked up a spoon in demonstration and it came away from the table with a thick string of a yellow slime still attached to the wood. "I mean honestly." He put it down.

"Sorry," Scott said, laughing a little and rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously. "We get busy, and Derek doesn't seem to care."

"Derek? Is that Wizard Hale?" Stiles wondered again how someone who dressed so nicely could live like this. "Are you his apprentice?"

"Yeah, the three of us," Scott's mouth turned down at the corners and he put down his sandwich, and started making little balls picking the bread apart. "I don't really want to learn magic, but I don't have anywhere to go."

"Why not?"

"My parents are dead," Scott said simply. "Well, my mom is. I don't know about my dad but I don't really care."

"I'm sorry," Stiles said. "How'd she die?"

"Went missing," Scott said. The corners of his mouth twisted down but he had the look on his face of a well-worn wound, scarred over and numb; it hadn't been recent. "People say she left me like my dad did but." He shrugged.

"Well what the hell do they know?" Stiles said, viciously, which startled a laugh out of Scott who said, star-struck, and when Stiles asked, said, "I thought old people were too polite to swear!"

Stiles, with his new raspy, old man voice, obligingly listed off, "Fuck damn those little pig shit lickers," and they sat and laughed about it until they discovered his old man cackle frightened Jackson enough into letting them make bacon, since there was a plate of it in an old foot trunk by the door that was magically ice cold ("How long has that been there?" Scott wondered).

"You're kind of pathetic for a demon," Stiles observed, as Jackson whined and shoved at the curled lip of the pan over his head. Stiles shoved down a little harder. "Oh, come on, it's just a little bacon."

"It _smells. You_ smell. I already do everything around this place. I'm not cooking! I never should have let you in!" but he settled down enough for Stiles to cook in peace.

This seemed to amaze Scott. "Jackson only lets Derek cook on him," he explained, when Stiles asked. "Jackson's kind of a jerk."

"So it takes a bigger jerk?" What have I gotten myself into? He thought.

"Yeah, pretty much. I mean—he's all right? He's an asshole but he doesn't let us starve. Usually," he amended hooking his gangly arms and chin over the back of the chair he'd pulled up from the table.

"I'm telling him you said that," threatened Jackson. Scott rolled his eyes and said, "Yeah, because he doesn't _know."_

When the bacon was done, Scott scrounged up a couple plates and they ate huddled around the table and talked about how long he'd lived here, ("Four years,") and the magic Scott was doing ("Curses? Really?" "Yeah, well—curse breaking.") and if he was any good at it ("No.") An hour later, Jackson flared in his grate, and when Stiles looked at the door, the window above it was pitch black—that wasn't right. It was noon.

A wheel Stiles had missed before, tacked up beside the door-jam and mounted with a silver mushroom-capped bolt through the middle, twirled around until the black portion was facing up. It was about as big around as two spread hands and cut into five equally sized wedges, each assigned their own color; blue, red, yellow, grey and finally black.

"What's that mean?" Stiles asked, and Scott, now standing, took Stiles' plate and said simply, "Derek's home."

The door flew open without a hand on the knob, and the wizard from the other day—at least, Stiles thought it was; he was still wearing all black, but he was missing his blue and silver waistcoat and the general air of tidiness. He was very dirty and disheveled, and had a terrible expression on his face. In any case, he appeared out of the darkness between the frame as if walking out of a shadow, and brought with him a god-awful sour stink of smoke that made Stiles wheeze. Hale—Derek?—Derek zeroed in on him.

"Who're you?"

Somewhat stupidly, Stiles had hoped he would have been recognized. Jackson had seen Stiles was under a curse, after all, so why not Derek? He was supposed to be powerful! Then Stiles could have easily said: _We met the other day. Remember? You almost got me killed!_ But he was clearly being delusional. Yesterday he'd been eighteen and didn't look like a worn leather pouch, so he said, "I'm the cleaning lady," and frowned at him, daring.

Derek seemed to get what he needed out of Stiles' expression and said, "Don't mess anything up," and stomped down the stairs—there was a set of stairs that led downstairs, now—and slammed a door.

"Yeah, fat chance of that happening!" Stiles yelled after him. "Have you seen this place?"

Stiles huffed and turned back to Scott, who hesitated and then after a moment said, "Well that went well."

"Why? Did you think he was going to throw me out?"

"I thought he might kill you," Scott admitted. "I wasn't going to let him!" He was hasty to add.

Stiles looked at him. "I guess there's a reason I like you."

—

Stiles didn't have a chance to talk to Derek about his curse or ferret out the details of Jackson's contract or where the mops were, because Derek didn't come out from the bowels of the castle for three days, and then only to flash his coattails as he slipped out the door one bleary grey morning.

By then Stiles had already found the mops and decided he was never going to find out about the contract directly, and it wasn't like he could talk about his curse _anyway_. He might as well spend his time making himself invaluable to the apprentices in the off chance Derek decided to throw him out on his ass. It was working: Erica had already latched on to the idea of regularly scheduled home cooked meals, and Isaac liked it when Erica was happy and tolerated Stiles well enough, and Scott seemed to like Stiles indiscriminately, so Derek would have a time of it forcing him out now.

In the meantime, Stiles cleaned the castle: it wasn't a pretty terrible. There wasn't one single flat surface that wasn't crusted with a barnacle mess of daily living: dirty plates and cutlery and napkins; leaning towers of old, fragile books; pots and pans and cups in the big mosaic sink; heaps of crusty clothing and odd pairless socks and muddy, abandoned boots at the perimeter, left where they were dropped.

In the corners of all the rooms, including the stairwell and the little open aired cubby in the curtained wall by the fire where Stiles had made his bed, there were extensive networks of spiders darting about on sticky silky webs. When he rightly tried to dust them out, Isaac, in a panic ("You can't just hurt them!"), collected them all in a bucket and set them free outside. It took the entire three days to get the kitchen and hearth and dining nook clean; unshelving a bookcase full of half molded jars of sticky green and yellow and purple pastes to restock with actual books; scrubbing all the dishes until they sparkled and stopped smelling; hanging laundry from the leaning, stuccoed parapets; windows wide open to out the dank smell of old air.

Of the windows in the castle, the only one that didn't frame the sprawling wilds of Beacon Valley was the one above the front door. He liked the bay windows on the third floor the best since they had the most expansive views of the farmers' yellow wheat fields, the herds of staid sheep and fluffy alpacas, the bogs and swamps and rangy forests close to the mountains.

The door that led outside, Stiles learned quickly, opened five ways, according to the colors on the wheel. Blue for Porthaven; red for Kingsbury; yellow for the wilds. He didn't know what the grey and black wedges were for, as the little bronze knob above the door lock wouldn't change the wheel to them, now matter how he turned it. The curiosity was enormous.

"Stop being so nosy," Jackson called from the fireplace, leaning out anxiously as far as he could from his grate to watch Stiles; for a fire demon he was a worrier.

"I'm not doing anything," Stiles protested. "Don't you wonder where they go?"

"I know where they go," Jackson said, and only relaxed once Stiles left it alone and grabbed a book, some illustrated drama with a soft blue cover— _Sophia's Journey,_ in gold leaf, with a handwritten personalization underneath the printed thanks, _To all our great adventures, H.J.—_ and sat down. "And I'm not telling you anything so stop it!"

Between pages, Stiles considered the blackness that had strung up in the doorframe, and gave up; he didn't know what kind of place would put such a horrible expression on a person's face and then decided maybe that was for the best.

—

"Can you get that?" Scott asked.

Stiles looked up from his book to the door. "Kingsbury," Jackson said, bored and flicking embers off his fingers into twisty-turvy patterns. A moment later there was a knock.

Stiles glanced at the wheel, which was pointed at Porthaven. "How can we hear that if it's pointed somewhere else?"

"Because _magic_ ," Jackson said slowly. The knocking continued, quite incessantly. The apprentices were huddled in a chalk circle in the middle of the floor, glowing faintly amber as they concentrated on the ring of dancing runes flitter around the circumference; thoroughly occupied. Stiles heaved himself out of the chair with an accordion yawn of cracking and popping bones and hobbled down the stairs; he turned the wheel to red.

He opened the door. "Yes, hello?"

It was a King's messenger. "Good afternoon, sir. Am I speaking to the great Wizard Drake?" He tipped his towering bearskin hat and when Stiles glanced back over his shoulder, Scott made an impatient _go on_ gesture at him without looking.

"Well—no, but if you have something I can take it," he said, looking back, and fumbled a little, being handed a neat velum roll with a red wax seal; it looked very important. "What's this then?"

"Summons to the palace, sir," said the guard. "It's a great honor it is, being invited to attend the King, don't need me to tell you. On a special quest even! Great honor indeed." He sounded like a wind up toy, and Stiles discreetly glanced over his shoulder for the twist key.

"What kind of quest?" He was struck with curiosity; this was almost like the start of a great adventure.

"Well, I can't very well go telling someone not a wizard about it now can I?" The messenger drew himself up into a proper military salute. "And you don't need me to tell you it's a crime to withhold a summons, or tamper with it, no sir."

"I'm not going to lose it," Stiles snapped, offended, and slammed the door. He could do that now. Old people were rude all the time. 

"Who was it?" Erica yelled, from behind him.

"Weren't you listening?" Stiles frowned up at her and then thumbed the waxy seal. He tugged at it a little, but it wouldn't give even hair, and sparked a little, warningly when he tried; magic. The air was thick now with oozy amber light creeping across the floorboards toward the staircases.

"No," she said.

"Messenger from the King," he said. "Who's Wizard Drake?"

There came another knock. If it was the same guy Stiles was going to be angry; he knew how to deliver mail! He hadn't lost his mind! But when he opened the door there wasn't anyone there save a mom and her kid swanning neatly by in a swish of high fashion across the street, both of whom gave him a passing, judgmental glance at his plain clothes and frantic white hair. A quick survey revealed that this was indeed a posh neighborhood. "Porthaven door!" Jackson yelled irritably from inside, so Stiles twisted the wheel knob, but when he opened the door again he was staring out at an empty field of posies swaying gently in the frame of the door as the castle moved.

"Porthaven door I said!" Jackson repeated, and Stiles yelled back, "Yes, I heard you the first time," and twisted the knob to blue. 

"What?" He demanded. It was another messenger. Blue uniform this time instead of red, with that same, forgettable banal expression on his face.

"Message for Wizard Greywolf," said the man, with enormously slow enunciation. "Is he in?"

"I'll take it," said Stiles, and made a grabby motion with his hand, and when the man hesitated, clearly torn on his orders, Stiles guessed, "Special quest? Summons to the castle? We've been expecting it," and when the messenger still didn't hand it over—as if Stiles was going to go on a quest for a wizard! As if he cared!—he reached out and snatched it from his hands and then slammed the door and turned the wheel yellow so no one could get in.

"Do you have to be _so loud?_ " Jackson shouted, which was swallowed by an elaborate noise as the spell in the kitchen exploded.

—

"It was an _accident,"_ Scott said, but he winced as Stiles dabbed at his face with a cool cloth.

"You have no _eyebrows,_ " Stiles focused on the salient point. The other two had flounced up to their rooms to lick their wounds in private. "And now I have to clean this whole room again!" Scott winced with guilt—good! "What were you doing anyway? Should you have been doing something that dangerous?"

The evidence that amounted from Isaac and Erica's hasty retreat and the sudden, caught-animal fear on Scott's face told Stiles that no, they shouldn't have been doing it and no Derek probably hadn't given them permission to try it, and yes, they probably would have died or set everything on fire! "It was an experiment," Scott said. "We wanted to fix something!"

Stiles glared at him. "What did you break?"

"Nothing—nothing, no seriously it was just a—uh, test. We didn't mean anything by it!" He said hastily, affecting an extremely guilty look on his face. Stiles gave up; he knew the look of kept secrets and it wasn't like they were dead or anything.

"Yes, okay, fine, I don't care." Stiles handed Scott a pocket mirror, to survey the damage. "Don't do it again. Blah blah blah, who's Drake and Greywolf?"

He supposed he already knew the answer; pen-names or aliases. Hale had a horrible reputation in Beacon, where he ate souls and the hearts of the young women who fell in love with him. It was just as well to be someone else in more important parts of the world. But Scott didn't seem to be paying attention; he was staring into the little mirror at himself with something akin to full body horror, and said with consuming mortal despair, "I don't have any eyebrows!"

"Yes," Stiles said patiently. "That's what I said."

"I thought you were joking! I thought you were trying to make me feel better!"

"Why would I joke about that?"

Scott shrugged one shoulder, fingers still clasped to the little glass rectangle, staring into it. "I don't know. You have a weird sense of humor. You laughed!" he accused.

"It's funny because it's real!" Stiles said, and then, "It'll grow back. It's just hair," but Scott wasn't listening over his semi-hysterical gasps of, "What will my girlfriend think?" and, "Oh, god, what if she leaves me," and other nonsense. Who would leave Scott? Honestly.

"Girlfriend?" Stiles asked, latching on eagerly. He probably sounded like an old pervert, but it distracted Scott at least, who, faced with his own crisis or expounding on his love, took the latter and said, "Her name's Allison."

Stiles stared at him.

"What," said Stiles finally.

"She works at the candy shop," Scott continued, oblivious, and sighed in the way people do in the face of strong new love. "She's _amazing."_

"How'd you meet her?" he asked, thinking, _you little liar_ , before he realized that she hadn't said she _hadn't_ met a wizard. _You little liar,_ he decided, because she _hadn't_ said she'd hadn't.

Scott had a great deal to say about Allison ("She's so nice!") and Allison's hair ("It's so pretty!") and how good she smelled all the time ("Like chocolate oranges!"), before Stiles threw up a little in his mouth and made him stop.

"What if she sees me now and dumps me?" Scott asked with misery. The elder brother in Stiles ( _good! Stay away from her!)_ was torn with family loyalty ( _She would never do that! She won't care!)_ and the painful surety that she was very extremely angry with him if he interfered here. So he said, "Just tell her, I don't know, you saved a kitten from a fire."

Scott blinked at him. "Do you think that'd work?"

 _No,_ he thought. "No!" he said. "And don't lie to someone you love!"

"Right, right, you're right," Scott said hastily. "I'm sorry. I'm just freaking out. I want her to like me."

Now that he was old, he got headaches much more easily and they stuck around like guests you want to leave. He rubbed at his temple to relieve the pressure. "Just tell her the truth. She'll like that."

Scott didn't look like he understood. "But I blew up the kitchen," he pointed out.

"Yes, I know." Stiles was suddenly very glad he grew up socialized with sisters. "You made a mistake, and were honest about it," Stiles said, and patted him on the shoulder. "She'll like that more than a lie."

—

Stiles sent Scott to his room, surveyed the blackened damage to the table and floor and left it as a bad job for tomorrow to go deliver the letters, both crumpled from where he'd dropped and stepped on them in his haste. He eased his way down the stairs to the basement. They were much steeper than the others; he was probably going to slip and break a hip! On the landing his examined the door. It was a thick dark wood with a brass handle and a wrought iron knocker that looked like a wolf muzzle. He tapped the knocker ring twice against the bell plate and waited.

"What?" said the doorknocker, it's iron jaw falling open.

Stiles startled, but said, "You have mail."

Without pause, the knocker said, "Throw it away," and snapped shut.

Stiles blinked and waited, but there was nothing else added, so he used the ring again. It disappeared. Fine! He thought, and rapped his knuckles on the wood. "What?" said the knocker again, sounding angry.

"You have mail," Stiles repeated, getting angry himself. Spend all your time in the basement and then get upset when people want to find you? What a dick. "And it's from the king. It's important. Come and get it."

"No," said the knocker.

"Don't you want to know what it is?"

With an immeasurably annoyed sigh, the knocker said, "I know what it is. They've sent them before and I'm not doing it."

"Well _I_ don't know what it is," Stiles said. He fiddled with the seal again but it sparked and singed his fingers. "Stop that," he told it. It died off but he didn't try again, wary.

"Yeah, 'cause it's not for you. Stop being so nosy."

"Stop being so mysterious!" Stiles said. He wondered if he could cut around the seal with a knife. "It's just a question."

"Yeah, and none of your business either," said the knocker, but a second later added, "It's orders to find the prince. There's a reward. All the wizards and witches in Ingary have been getting them and before you ask, I'm not doing it."

Stiles gaped. "How can you say that?" he demanded. "This could end the war!" he paused. "You're not powerful enough for it Re you?" he guessed.

"I'm plenty powerful," the knocker said, offended. "I just don't want to! Stop being pushy."

Stiles crossed his arms, abruptly and overwhelmingly disgusted. "It's your _civil duty_ ," he added, to which the knocker laughed and said, "No it really isn't."

Stiles wanted to kick the door down and go in there and beat him with a broom. His leg would definitely break before that happened, so he just glared.

"I'm not a _good_ wizard, Mr. Nosy Cleaning Lady," said the knocker, and a long metal tongue licked out and curled around the letters in Stiles' hand and rolled up back into the mouth. The paper disappeared. Stiles wiped his hand on his waistcoat. "Don't expect much out of me."

"Fine I won't!" Stiles said, and stomped back upstairs, and then back down again. "And your apprentices are doing dangerous things without supervision! You should be paying attention to them."

"Isn't that what you're for?" Derek asked, snide, and before Stiles could explain how very much that was _not_ his job and how very impossible it was for an old body like this to keep up with _reckless idiots_ and make sure they didn't _explode themselves—_ Derek added, sobered. "I'll keep track of it."

There was stretching moment of silence. Stiles snorted and then spent the next hour looking through the apprentice spell books in the kitchen. Locator spells. Proximity spells. There had to be something even an ordinary person could do.

"Yeah, probably, but we've tried all those," Erica said, later at dinner when Stiles asked about it. "We don't know where Derek keeps all the advanced books, or even if he has any so." She trailed off and bit into an orange wedge, and squirted Isaac in the eye with juice, who shouted and flicked water at her. Meanly, Stiles thought they weren't quite ready for the advanced books yet. "Anyway," Erica continued after they'd washed and stacked their plates and migrated to the chairs around the fire. "He's not really interested in the war. He won't let us do anything about it."

"Why not?" Stiles grumbled, remembering the soldiers' uniforms he'd mended and that last one's terrible vacant gaze, like he wasn't even there. It felt good to be angry; it was like his body forgot it was old. "He has the power for it, doesn't he? And the resources."

"He's kind of selfish and doesn't want anything to happen to us," Isaac said, quietly, eyeing him oddly. The three of them were, actually, staring openly. He felt self-conscious; he was pretty ugly now, sucked dry and left gasping. "And we don't want anything to happen to him either so. He's kind of a butt hole—" Isaac didn't swear around him, hilarious enough; like he thought Stiles would fall over in shock, "But he's our—" he scrunched his nose, and Erica tittered. "I'm not finishing that, you get the point."

Yes, he did, and all the anger went out of Stiles; he imagined his dad in the army, or maybe even Lydia, now that she was learning magic. Or even Allison, if she got bored with the sweet life. He wouldn't want them there either. In a wave of pitted homesickness, Stiles sunk back down into his chair, all the aches and pains surging back in with it.

"I wonder where he went," Scott mused. "What if he just went for a walk one day and got lost?"

"Hard to get lost right out of Kingsbury," Erica said, which was true. "It'd be funny though, if he just randomly showed it."

"Yeah," Stiles said, even though it wouldn't be; whoops went for a stroll, killed a bunch of people. Sorry! He snorted, which sent him coughing and hacking into a napkin. "One day he'll just be like, here I am! Right on the side of the road."

—

Eight days into Stiles' castle tenancy, Derek started heading off to Beacon during the midmorning hours of the day and coming back in time to give magic lessons or bother Stiles ("What're you cleaning? Don't touch this. Don't touch that. No seriously, those are priceless first edition Pendragons!" "Well maybe you should keep better track of them!).

It was all very suspicious.

"If he's not in the army and he doesn't work for the king, then what does he do all day?" Stiles asked, putting down the knife he was polishing.

Erica didn't look up from her book; toes tucked under her thighs, cozy in the armchair with a throw around her shoulders and bright, glossy hair. "Picking up chicks."

"What?" Stiles said.

"Getting laid?" she clarified. She looked at him then and frowned and very clearly didn't want to have to explain that any further.

Stiles rolled his eyes. "I know what that means," Stiles said. "I was expressing _disbelief._ Are you sure that's it?"

"He's not out picking flowers," Erica said, snotty.

Derek was certainly handsome enough for it. In other circumstances (i.e. not old and not a wizard) Stiles would kiss him. He would probably be very good at it too. He had a soft looking mouth and big hands for holding tight, and fine silky hair. He would probably be _very_ good. And that was when Stiles realized that he was probably never going to have sex again, and when that revelation settled in his stomach like a huge impossible gallstone and didn't pass, he decided to take a nap.

"Yeah, I think he mentioned someone," Scott agreed, when Stiles asked him later. "There's this new witch he's interested in."

Stiles had a horrible feeling. "Oh?" he asked meekly, praying _no, please no._

"Lyra something?" Scott said, and from the potion desk in the corner Isaac said, "Lydia."

"Wonderful," Stiles grumbled under his breath, and went back to bed.

—

Everything was misty and hazy; a dream, he was pretty sure. He was young again, which confirmed it, so he spent a good long time just reveling in the feeling of it; his ankles didn't hurt; he could stretch to his full height, arch his back on the little narrow cot; touch his fanned toes to one wall and his scalp to the other; it was comfortably claustrophobic and he felt warm and heavy and solid. He had muscle tone again! It was great.

The front door swung open; the window was black but it was also pretty late. Stiles closed his eyes and pretended he was sleeping. He wasn't sure why, but it seemed very important all of a sudden that he didn't look awake—dream awake. He heard a shuffling noise of heavy feet and a slither of cloth rolling off skin to the floor and the familiar muffled wheeze of the armchair by Jackson taking weight. He peeked. Derek was sitting with his face in his hands, bare-chested. Jackson had woken up and was leaning urgently out of his grate. Derek was injured, Stiles realized first, bloody scrapes down his arms, like from claws or a sword. He _was_ fighting, Stiles realized second, feeling vindicated. He _knew it._

"You look like shit," hissed Jackson, which broke Stiles out of his self-congratulations to roll his eyes beneath his lids.

"Nothing gets by you," Derek agreed, voice wan and tight. "Hey, let's shut up about it."

" _I'm_ in danger too, you know. In case you've _forgotten._ I don't like this. You should stop—"

"They're turning themselves into monsters," Derek said calmly, as if he was talking about the very interesting paint drying rise over time run.

"—Because fuck if you ever think about me for once—no way seriously?"

Derek nodded, and then sighed, sounding weary. "These lizard things. They're pretty awful."

Jackson was quiet. "They'll never get back from that." And it must be pretty bad, because Jackson sounded quiet and regretful, and Stiles hadn't supposed that was a range of accessible emotions for him.

"They won't know they'll want to," Derek said, and got up. Stiles could hear the quiet splatter of dripping blood onto the floor—great, he was going to have to clean that up—and then walked over to Stiles' cubby. Stiles hastily smoothed out his face, and felt Derek's gaze on him for long, unrelentingly weird minutes before he sighed and groaned a little and creaked down the stairs.

Stiles sat up and was—awake. It was morning, grey with very early light. When he got out of bed—spine cracking down a like a piano scale—there wasn't any blood on the floor or on the chair. Jackson looked at him suspiciously and didn't seem to think anything was wrong, chewing on a twig. "What're you looking at? Get out of my face!"

Yeah, definitely a dream.

—

He shouldn't let that change anything—since it wasn't real—but it did make him feel weird about all of them eating breakfast together while Derek hid in the basement. From the sound of it, he was usually around more than this. Stiles couldn't imagine he was frightening enough to scare a wizard out of his own living room, but apparently that was the case.

One morning he held up a plate of thick slices of rosy back bacon and three links of sausages and a neat pile of scrambled eggs next to golden stack of brown medallion flat cakes, glistening with melted butter and said, loudly, "Breakfast!"

"Not hungry," was the immediate response. The knocker sniffed at the plate and licked its chops, so Stiles said, "Right, I believe you," earnest, and, "I just can't believe how delicious this smells," and left the plate just out of reach for biting, but close enough to smell. "Yum, yum, yum."

The door opened and Derek eased out from behind it. His big solid body blocked the view of the inside; stubborn. He made a grab at the plate but Stiles hoarded it close to his chest, spindly arms hooked around the curve of it and edged away as he said, "We eat at the table you heathen," and creaked back up the stairs. Derek made a frustrated noise but followed.

Afterwards, Jackson complained, but filled the sink with hot water, and while the apprentices argued quietly by the table and stacked plates, Derek helped him dry the dishes. Well, not precisely; he animated a towel to dry as Stiles finished cleaning them, and when Stiles murmured, "Lazy," reluctantly impressed, all Derek said was, "It's useful for something."

The breakfast thing turned out to be a success. Stiles' only real true motivation for it in the first place had been self-interest; he didn't want to feel guilty about Derek not eating, and being forced to subsist on the powers of darkness he had refining in his hide-y-hole. He came up now, most mornings, and it was worth it just for Isaac, who seemed in a great mood all the time now that Derek was around to say, "Morning," and "Can you pass the salt," and "You've got that symbol flipped, it should be the inverse, Kaptab," and, "Nice hair, whatcha feed it?"

It made Stiles think of his own family; the needling and playfulness. Did they wonder where he was? Were they worried? Did they miss him? He missed them with a fearsome kind of loneliness, separated from all the people who knew him best.

"You ever play Taro Wars?" Scott asked, bumping his shoulder gently with Stiles' and holding up a thick stack of playing cards. At his shaken head no, Scott went on. "It's really simple—Derek explain the rules."

Derek studied them for a minute then reached a long arm over the table to pluck the cards out of Scott's hand. He laid the first card. "You start off with a Star."

—

Stiles' days were uniformly boring, now. He woke up; the main areas were clean now, so he started sorting through the garbage in the guest rooms or the shed out on the low grassy terrace or even the attic, if his cranky, crinkly knees could handle the ladder. He was often very tired, and napped for hours; in his cubby or the armchair where it was warm. He usually woke up from the last with his muscles cramped and hurting; Charlie horses in his calves and along the arches of his feet bad enough to make all his toes curl in and make him want to cry; neck puffy and tender—

"Here," Derek said quietly. He waggled a skinny-necked stoppered bottle in Stiles' face.

Stiles took it and rolled it between his palms; deep blue glass, chipped at the lip, full of something viscous that crept up the neck as he angled it down. When it caught the light it glinted faintly, and he spent an endless frustrating minute working open the cork, his fingers weak against the suction. He didn't let Derek help. When he finally got it open, the liquid inside turned to be a thick silver paste that smelled like how snow looked and tingled gently against his fingertips like mint.

"It's good for pain," Derek explained.

"What's it made of?" Stiles asked, rubbing a small bit of it between his thumb and middle finger; it had an odd texture, like metal and cloth, but slippery as well.

"The usual: coral, winterbane, eye of newt," and Stiles snorted, said, "Ha," while Derek blithely went on, "Blood of a sacrificial virgin, paprika," and Stiles said, "Yes, okay, I get it, you won’t tell me,” and it was a nice thought, it was, but as long minutes passed and Stiles failed at even taking off a shoe, it seemed fairly pointless. His back felt corded and stiff, like a tree bent too far, quivering, bark cracking. Useless. This body was so goddamn useless and frail and he _hated it._ He wanted his own body back, he wanted his _time_ back—

Derek bent down at the foot of the chair and slipped off Stiles' shoes and socks and rolled his pant legs into neat cuffs. He took the bottle from Stiles’ trembling hands and rubbed a palm full of it into Stiles' twiggy calves with long, sure strokes, efficient, a little mindless. For a minute the humiliation was excruciating, and prickled his eyes, but then the relief set in, cool and relaxing, draining off the hot seize of his muscles. He said, "Thank you," wiping his damp cheek, and Derek just nodded, like it was nothing; a chore maybe. Make the old man comfortable. Stiles wanted to be angry—this isn't me!—but wasn't, for some reason, and just quietly watched as Derek rolled down his pants and helped him back into his socks.

"I'll get you a something with a better stopper," Derek said at last, and before Stiles could say anything to that, he turned and walked out the door.

Jackson was peeking out of the logs. Stiles was suddenly impatient, "What?" he demanded, spoiling for a fight; it was the only thing left.

Jackson surprisingly didn't go for it, just said, "I'm not making tea," which was at least familiar. Stiles laughed weakly and spread some of the paste on his hands and got up to get the kettle.

A couple days later he was embarrassed about it—the reaction, the weakness, the pity—and went out with Scott to look around Porthaven. The fish markets were extensive and smelly, and while Scott got a bass for dinner, Stiles found a stuffy cubby of bookshop, musty with old paper and later, when Derek found _The Art of War_ hanging from a soft fabric bow from his knocker, he actually snorted.

Stiles woke up to _Incontinence and You: When the Damn Breaks._ And smiled.

—

Derek was still mysteriously disappearing during the day, after breakfast. He came back earlier now, for dinner. He was a surprisingly good cook. Stiles hadn't anticipated it, since there'd only been bacon and stale bread when he'd first gotten here. The pantry was clean now, and stocked, and Derek had an easier time with Jackson then Stiles could manage, and didn't burn anything.

He made a lot of things—pork chops with garlic mashed potatoes, the peeler peeling ten feet away, steamed green and fresh cheese sauce; achingly delicate sole with salty capers; thick meaty steaks and double stuffed potatoes—all of it was delicious. 

“Where’d you learn to cook?” Stiles asked.

Derek went still over his skillet—fried mushrooms and buttery chicken—and then said, “Before I lived here I worked in a kitchen. They let me cook sometimes.” He nodded like he was remembering; it was getting easier to talk to him. He seemed to be adjusting to Stiles. “And then I lived on my own.”

“My dad taught me,” Stiles said, and then laughed. “My mom was a shit cook.”

“Better with a needle?” Derek asked and Stiles startled, and said suspiciously, “How did you know that?”

“You have a thimble in your pocket,” Derek explained, and with a flick of his fingers it shot out of Stiles’ pocket and hovered in the air. Stiles snatched it back. It had been his mother’s favorite; sterling silver with a little engraved bluebird. “I saw you fiddling with it,” Derek added.

Stiles hadn’t even noticed; but that was a habit for you. “Yeah, she was a tailor, like me. I used to—” he cleared his throat, and stowed the thimble. “Before I got these old mitts, you understand.”

Derek nodded, and turned back to his skillet.

Sometimes Derek would sit by him and read by the fire, while Stiles stitched together a new quilt for himself. After that conversation, Derek had left a box of quilt cuttings by Stiles’ cubby. (“Don’t know unless you try,” he’d said, at Stiles’ doubtful look. It turned out he could). It was something to do, and he was often cold at night. It was nice, he liked the quiet; he hadn't before, but he supposed that was age—

"What're you reading?" Stiles asked, one night, the other three upstairs practicing levitation. His curiosity to join them was overwhelming but Derek had said no.

"Wilshank's treatise on the metamorphogy of higher sapients combining the Rahgdark principle with the Aulric alchemical spell circles," Derek said promptly, and turned a page.

He didn’t know what to say to that. "Sounds boring," Stiles said honestly.

Derek snorted and agreed: "He's a dumbass; you can't use an alchemical equivalence transformation or you'll end up with an arm sticking out of your ass. He knows it too; I told him, but he thinks he's right. He's a _theorist,"_ Derek explained, with a tone of voice that said exactly what was the problem with that. "Well guess what, magic doesn't work like that."

"Why'd he do it then, if he was wrong? Seems like a bad idea."

Derek shrugged and said, "He hasn't been published in forever," like that was an excuse. He turned the pages to Stiles, "And it makes nice pictures," and he was right, it did indeed make nice pictures.

In any case, Derek went out a lot, and Stiles was very suspicious about this Lydia rumor, so, bored one day, Stiles had an idea.

"I want to go to town," Stiles announced, throwing his cloth and half scrubbed pan into the sink. "I haven't been to Beacon in weeks."

Scott got out his hiking boots, and Stiles heart sunk. Derek had left an hour ago, they'd never catch up. And he didn't honestly know if he was up for the trek. Getting there? Maybe. Getting back? No. "Don't you have a spell to get us there?"

Derek had one, Scott admitted, but he didn't know how to work it safely.

"I'm sure you can figure it out," Stiles said loyally, patting him on the shoulder. "I am absolutely 100 percent convinced you can do it," and wouldn't you know it? Scott got out the book and wrote the little chalk circle on the floor and said a couple words and then there was a curvy swirl of vertigo and they were standing in front of Camilla's. It smelled exactly like he remembered it. Cloyingly sweet, buttery with their candied popcorn, and salty with roasted nuts; peanuts, hazel nuts, pecans, pistachios. Stiles was faintly sure he was going to vomit, but he staved it off with will. Success!

Scott looked a little alarmed. "I didn't think that'd work. I thought we were gonna die," he admitted, and stared at Stiles with faint alarm.

"What?" Stiles said, and hustled him in. He'd want to see Allison before they left. "Wait!" he said, suddenly panicked. She couldn't know what happened to him. Scott turned to him, eyes wide and listening. "Don't tell her about me," Stiles said, and then winced, because it made him sound like a predator.

"Why?" Scott asked warily, and Stiles held up his hand, no, no, no, you have the wrong idea, and said, "I don't like it when strangers know my name," which was almost worse and Scott's harried expression said as much, but he just nodded, said, "Okay, whatever you want," and darted away.

Stiles hung out near the candied apples, which was the farthest station from Allison's—cupcakes—and watched sadly out of the corner of his eye as they blushed and smiled and giggled at each other. It was gross, he thought, rubbing a spec out of dirt out of his eye. His sister was in love—nasty. Other than that, she seemed to be doing all right, and even sent Scott away with a little pink bag of treats, and a little extra sugar on his cheek, smiling crazily as he left.

"Isn't she great?" Scott asked, blissed, and Stiles horrified, said quickly, "Yes, yes, very nice," and shoved him out, out, out into the street.

Beacon was in the chokehold of a sweaty, humid June. He could feel it through the thin soles of his shoes, the radiating heat of the camel colored brickwork, glaring off white stucco and the high gloss windows with the neatly stenciled typeface, the wilting window-box posies and tulips and drooping bleeding hearts. Stiles didn't have any money, but Scott did ("Derek leaves it laying around!") so they hired an open-air carriage with an eager marbled gelding to take them up to the Heights.

"Where are we going?" Scott asked, once they'd passed out of Center Square, and through the looping lanes of Royal Oaks, past the squat grey columns of the parliament building and the cluttered windows of the toyshop.

"Following Derek," Stiles said. Scott looked briefly betrayed, but then rolled his eyes and sat back and said, "Yeah, should have seen that coming," and Stiles complained, "He could be taking advantage of a helpless young woman!" to which Scott hummed and threw a handful of conjured bread crumbs at some fat pigeons. 

They passed out of town and into greater suburbia, where the clustered huddle of storefronts and tenements buildings gave way to lush rolling lawns and wealthy umbrella trees, their reaching branches casting cool, speckled shadows over the road. The houses that ballooned up as they passed managed to brush the size bracket of the castle, and were almost as ugly. Miss Morrell's, on the other hand, once they got to it, was an understated and lovely creamy salmon, with looming high arched windows and sprawling rose gardens, neat roof tiles.

"How do you know he's here?" Scott asked, as Stiles paid the driver.

"The witch he's interested in," Stiles said reluctantly. "Lydia? She's my—grand-niece. I just want to make sure she's all right." Scott gave him an odd look but followed.

They decided to skip going to the door. Lydia liked being outside on hot days. They took the gravel path round to the back of the house, past a large and sweating domed terrarium and a statue garden of large, exotic animal, until finally— "There!" Scott whispered, and grabbed Stiles arm, and yes, there was Derek, sitting side by side with Lydia on a long white-marble bench. They looked friendly. Stiles and Scott hid behind a large stone elephant.

"Can you hear what they're saying?" Stiles asked, and Scott gave him an odd look and said, "No," but they both heard Lydia laugh, and Lydia didn't laugh at anything unless—

This was bad. Stiles hadn't been worried about her. She usually saw through this kind of bullshit!

"We have to do something," Stiles hissed, and Scott looked confused.

"Why?" he asked, glancing back, "He seems to like her. Wait," he shot Stiles a disappointed look, "He's not going to hurt her."

"Well, no," Stiles admitted. "But she deserves much better."

"Well, obviously, _you'd_ think that," Scott muttered.

Stiles was about to demand what ever the hell that meant, but then a huge, Mastiff dog came barreling around the front of the house, barking and slobbering and making a great deal of a racket. It was aimed at Derek and Lydia, but when it spotted Scott and Stiles, beelined for them instead.

"Run." Scott shoved at him. "Run. Time to run!"

"Yes, I got that!" Stiles said, and followed him, and some cosmic justice granted him favor because he was able to keep up.

"Scott, teleport us," and Scott said, “I’m trying!” and Stiles said, “Try harder!” and there was a harrowing minute where Scott forgot the spell and floundered, but then he remembered and the next step Stiles took was a faceplant into the kitchen floor.

He checked himself; he hadn't broken anything. He laughed. "Scott that was awesome. You all right?"

"Well?" His voice was strangled. When Stiles glanced at him, the Mastiff was growling at Scott, frothy jowls a threatening inch from his face. It must have gotten caught in the spell. Great they were going to be mauled in their own house! It would stain! Then the dog looked around, and changed into a Labrador, and then into a man, and demanded, "Where's Hale?" and then turned into a bulldog.

They stared at it.

"I don't know what's happening here," Stiles said finally, feeling awkward, his voice a croak now. He looked at his wrinkled, leathery hands, and found them shaking. His heart hurt; the run was catching up with him. The dog—man?—mandog, crept closer, and when he turned back into a human this time, Stiles recognized him.

"You!" he shouted himself into a hacking, wheezing, coughing fit. "You were the guy with the Witch of the Waste!"

—

The mandog had indeed been with the Witch of the Waste. But he'd been under a spell of persuasion and wanted nothing to do with her, and couldn't seem to control his transformation to or from a dog, either. He also didn't remember who he was, or how he came to be under her power, only that he wished to be free.

"What do you want with Hale?" Stiles asked, the next time he was human, which was three hours later.

"To kill him, mostly," he admitted, sipping gratefully at a cup, "I'm pretty sure it's his fault I'm like this."

"How do you figure?"

"Irrational dislike mostly," he admitted, which: that was fair. "And I want to keep him away from Lydia," which likened him to Stiles immediately, but he was obligated to say, "This is his castle, if you want to stay you can't attack him," which made Vernon—it was all he could remember—pause. In the end he accepted the terms—no measurable violence—and when Derek got home he was reclining long and lean on a rug near the fire as a lovely greyhound.

"We have a dog now," Stiles explained, waving a spatula at him, and shushing Jackson's quiet snarl of, "There are too many people in this house."

"A cursed dog," Derek said, grumpy. "You know you could ask before you bring strays home."

Vernon snarled at him, Derek smirked back.

—

The hazy mist was back. Stiles woke up young. He couldn't pinpoint the exact reason until he concentrated. There it was; a low, heavy squelching noise. Footsteps. For a moment he was certain the Witch had found them; those were the goo monsters. He lied there, paralyzed with panic until he heard the pained, gasping accompaniment, and Jackson's barely there hiss of, "What are you doing!"

Derek didn't say anything. Stiles discreetly turned over and saw a large, disjointed shape limed with diffuse moonlight stumble down the stairs. After the door closed, Stiles leapt to his feet. The whole room swam like light in water; a fine mist clung to his ankles, rubbing like kittens, clinging like vines. It was like swimming through air, a distinct feeling of timelessness, and there was a thick, stinking, browning streak of blood leading from the front door down the back stairs. Jackson was silent, dull and blue in his grate. He picked his way down the stairs and found the door ajar; that wasn't right. He was sure he heard it close; regardless, he peeled it open and stepped inside.

At first he couldn't see anything, and when he fanned out his arms, he couldn't find the boundaries of the walls, like he'd dropped into a void; his footsteps didn't make a noise and the only sound was his high, anxious breathing, his heartbeat in his ears. The door disappeared behind him. Wonderful, he was already lost, and if Derek didn't feel like saving him, probably forever!

Then, as if by spotlight, a ring of ground appeared twenty feet in front of him, grey stained walls, like mold or fire damage, and rickety, uneven floorboards. They creaked when he applied weight to them, but didn't give. With great care, he picked his way across what started as a simple oval patch of floor and then extended out into a doorway, a long crooked hallway with a geometric library of shaped picture frames on the walls, all with smoke-blackened glass. Family portraits, he guessed. After that, another set of stairs, with a hole in the middle, as if a weight had gone down through it; he couldn't see the bottom but felt a sudden heaviness through his muscles, the belly-dropping terror of free-fall, a sudden pitched gasp—

Next was a living room, a long spacious rectangle with an upholstered couch kneeling on two missing legs, cushions bleeding pockets of cotton. The room was bisected by light once, and then again, a cross section of pitch blackness in the far triangle of the room, grey-scale sunlight streaming in from a hole in the roof, cut into thirds by naked, charred beams. He was all at once afraid; was this the castle? It didn't feel real; it felt like someplace else, someplace rotten. What was it doing in the basement? He didn't like it; he wanted to leave. What the hell possessed him to come down here? Oh, right—

"Derek?" his voice was canted high, tight, afraid, and he eased into the room with reluctance. He should just leave, he decided. Derek very clearly hadn't wanted him down here before. But then he thought— _you're being ridiculous. It's just a place_. And then his next clear thought was, _people have died here._

"You are so goddamn nosy," Derek's voice echoed and Stiles spun around on helpless tethers before he spotted him, sort of; he wasn't hiding in the shadows in the corner of the room, he _was_ the shadow, and when he pulled himself out of it, the darkness came with him, clinging to his skin—fur? He wasn't really a man anymore. Half sublimated by some kind of wolf—illusion? Transformation? _Metapmorphogy._ Stiles didn't know. His knuckles dragged on the ground, fingers clawed, eyes red. "What are you doing down here?"

"Looking for you, obviously," Stiles said waspishly; it was ridiculously cold down here. "Is this where you go all the time? I gotta say, it's pretty—"

"Don't," Derek warned.

"—creepy," he finished. "Something bad happened here, didn't it. I mean—"

"Stop it."

"—and I think I saw blood in the hallway—"

" _Shut up_."

"—and, oh god, did someone fall through the—"

Derek rushed him. He was at one end of the room and then all at one at the other in a space of a hiccup. It was intensely frightening in the way all new things were frightening and also because it kind of seemed like maybe he'd pushed it too far and now Derek was about to eat him. Well, no, he didn't believe that, and Derek came up short, looming over him, claws fanned, mouth breathing—gross—like he was preparing for it, but with no real tangible intent. Posturing, Stiles thought; he was trying to scare Stiles into running.

"You're not going to hurt me," Stiles said with conviction, and then an eye roll, because he wasn't. He'd rubbed a healing potion into his feet; he'd saved him from thugs; he’d cooked him dinner. It was counterproductive. That much was obvious. "Come on Derek, don't try that on me."

"Get out," Derek said. It sounded incredibly strained and slowly, carefully over-enunciated, and Stiles agreed that talking through a mouthful of those teeth would definitely be difficult, and then realized that Derek would rather navigate his mouth armory than change back and talk to him, so Stiles said, "No, I don't think that's a good idea," and just grinned nastily in Derek's face when he snarled out, " _I_ think it's a good idea."

"Right 'cause you're clearly full of good ideas all the time, I mean, look at this place. Very quaint, mausoleum chic. I don't like it. I think you should—come back to the castle and, I don't know. I'm just trying to help."

Very quietly, and very still, Derek said, "You can't even help yourself, Stiles," and Stiles didn't—he didn't understand, until he looked down at his hands. They were—old again; wrinkly, pitted, spotted. He'd forgotten, somehow, that that was still real, and when he looked up again, Derek was right there, in his face. Stiles startled back, but it hurt, and when Derek roared, this great eclipsing noise, he flew back, out of the room, up the stairs and down the hall, into the blackness and then—

Woke up.

He sat up. His neck hurt; he must have slept on it funny. Jackson was lazily setting sticks on fire and animating them to run around the lip of the hearth. Scott, Isaac, Erica and Veron the dog were sitting at the table. Derek was making breakfast. There was no blood on the floor. Derek looked fine.

"There a problem?" Derek asked politely, and all the others turned to look at him. Stiles stared at his shaking old fingers, and said, "No."

Derek flicked his fingers and a book flew across the room to present its title at Stiles; gold leaf, leather-bound with a clasp: _Ghost Stories and Other Terrible Tales,_ with a subscript, _The compiled compilation of P. Dragon,_ with a guaranteed to scare even the stoutest folks. It worked, Stiles was suddenly afraid.

—

The wheel was turned grey up.

The apprentices were out. Derek had gone to Kingsbury, and the last Stiles had checked, it had been red. Jackson was snoozing, a little blue ember right at the bottom of the logs; he wouldn't get another chance at this. Stiles, quick as he could, grabbed his cane and his shoes and a sweater and hobbled down the stairs. The doorknob turned easily, and he said at a whisper, "If you don't want me to check this out, say so now," and didn't wait for the silence.

He came out with a view of a forest of flaky birch and tall spindly poplars and a weedy, overgrown dirt road snaking away off into the distance. He was standing on a porch culturing spongy, green moss, and when he stepped off the stairs and looked back, he found himself staring at a half-collapsed mansion. Once, at seven, Stiles had watched his dad lever loose a wasp nest into a small, cherry red fire. The wasps had been stunned from the smoke, and the stumpy, bone-white larva had wriggled and writhed desperately out of their holes as the hive's papery dome collapsed from the heat. This house looked like that—like a strong wind would pick it up and blow it away, send the feathery pieces up into the sky like a pyre.

"Oh," he said, understanding, and then a woman behind him said, "Hey, this is private property."

"I'm sorry," he said, turning. "I didn't mean to—" she looked half-familiar, although he was certain he'd never seen her before in his life. Dark hair, pale eyes, carrying a paper wrapped bundle of lilies. "I don't know where I am. I think I'm lost. Can you tell me?" and she took one look at him, a neat cut to the cane, frowned and said, "Oh, Jesus, yeah, come on."

She helped him down the road and into a sleek black automobile—Stiles had only ever seen one at a distance; only very rich people had them—but nothing like this. There was _power_ in the way it roared to life, but when he said, "Is this magic?" expecting a laugh, the woman only frowned at him, concerned.

"Well if you count horsepower," she said at last, and then they _flew._

—

Laura, he learned, took him down a smooth coal road, painted yellow down the center—weird—and into a town where there were _many_ automobiles lined along the street, and people out in odd, severe cut clothes. It took twenty minutes to get to a bi-level blue house with white trim. Laura hustled him inside. Once she'd given him a glass of water and sat him down on the couch, said, "Do you have anyone I can call? What were you doing out at that house?"

Stiles took a drink of water for time. She'd left the flowers on the porch, so Stiles guessed and said, "Do you know anyone named Derek Hale?"

Her face when white, and then red with anger. "How do you know that name?" she demanded, and he held up his hands and said, "I work for him. I'm his—cleaning lady."

She wasn't expecting that. "Cleaning—oh come on he wouldn't make an old man—" she paused and looked unimpressed and then sighed. "Of course he would. He hates cleaning," she hesitated and frowned, mouth slanting down in unhappiness. "Do you know where he is?"

"Yes he's," _through the door_ , but he stopped on a thought: _there's no magic here_. It was a relief to realize it, because there was something dead about the air in the place, not a smell, just a feeling, and he realized if he started talking about magic doors and moving castles, she'd shut him out and he'd never get anywhere. "He's safe," he said at last, which wasn't what she wanted to hear, but she relaxed.

"Oh, well good," she said a little waspishly, and then deflated and admitted, "I haven't seen him in ten years."

She was his sister, he guessed, too young for anything else, and too close for a cousin—the really deep wounds always came from close family, the pockets you live in until you're too big for the seams—and then he understood how Derek could hide down in the basement for days like it was nothing; he'd had a decade of practice, and it made him feel inexplicably angry on Laura's behalf. "I'm sorry," he said, and "He's not very good with people," and, "He misses you." He didn't think it was a lie; Derek always seemed to be looking for something.

For a moment, she had an aching, blown wide expression on her face, hungry for this pittance offering, but then if closed off, shuttered away behind old anger. "Well if he missed me, he should have paid a visit, or maybe let me know he was _alive_."

"Hey! He's been pretty busy, you know," Stiles said, reluctantly irritated, and she snapped, "Oh what do you know about it," and he said, before thinking, "Well he's fighting a war, for one thing, even though he doesn't want anyone to know about it! Like what does he think will happen if he doesn't come home one day? Because I can tell you—" and regretted it at once as she gasped and went pale and a little dazed, shocky.

She stared at him. "You said he was safe!" she yelled.

"He is! Well, mostly," he admitted. This was going very badly, he wasn't good at this _at all_. "He's safe when he's at home. But I don't know when he just sneaks off—"

"He _sneaks off_ to go to war!" She looked torn between disbelief and certain rage that that was exactly what was happening. “He’s in _Afghanistan?”_

"He's very wily!" Stiles said, ignoring the rest. "Look I don't know what happened between you two, but I think he's getting more reckless and he came home just coveredin blood the other night; well I think he did, it kind of felt like a dream but I'm _sure_ it wasn't and—" and he thought, _you are the stupidest dumbass alive_ because she'd started shaking, horrified. "Sorry," he said, uselessly.

He was afraid she was going to cry. Finally she said, "What a giant idiot, I could kill him," and made a low frustrated noise, and then laughed like you do when there was nothing else to say.

"If it makes you feel better, I often think that," Stiles offered.

"Well at least he hasn't changed much," she muttered, and then, hesitant, "Can you tell me a little about him? How is he?" She looked desperately lonely, and he ached for her.

"Where to start?" he grumbled. "He's not very clean. You should have seen it when I got there! Mess everywhere! And he had three students to take care of! Well, I mean, they're adults, it's not like they can't pick up a broom—"

"So he's a private tutor?" she asked and he hovered his hand, palm down, tipped it sideways like a see-saw, _sort of._

"It's a little more complicated than that? He's kind of their guardian, too." Her eyebrows shot up. "That's what I thought! But they like him well enough and he's not too bad really. He wants them to be safe, and cooks, sometimes. He could stop hanging out in the basement so much." He reached out to fiddle with his water glass. "He's a pretty good man. He's not all that nice all the time, but he let me stay with him even though he didn't have too. He's, well, generous I guess you could say, and he doesn’t make me feel very old—what?"

She was staring at him, oddly, as if she was looking at a completely different person. They really were related. He wasn't pissed off _all_ the time. He could be nice too! He could recognize the positive qualities in others! "You know I never believed him. About the magic."

"What," Stiles said.

"He could never show me, and I always thought he was making stuff up," she reached out as if to touch his face, but then let her hand drop. "But here you are. God, maybe if I'd just listened." She sighed, deep from her belly. "I guess it doesn't really matter, now. You're taking care of him?"

"I—yes?" Stiles hedged, feeling odd about it. All he did was chores; wasn't anything special really, but she said, "I'm glad," and that was the end of it.

Then she stood up and walked down an adjoining hall. There was a sound of a door opening over carpet, boxes being moved, and then she came back with a little folded square of soft white paper, worn at the corners and frayed at the creases. This had been handled with great care for a very long time. _This is my dad,_ he thought, and ached; left with a note and nothing else. "The last time I saw him he gave me this," she said.

Stiles unfolded it. It was a badly drawn wax crayon comic of a kid, dark hair, standing out in a field. The next panel had motion markers in the sky, a falling star, then: a game of tag, a—kiss? Maybe he ate it?—and then a pink heart in hand, which in the next panel became another little boy, made of fire. He _ate a star,_ was his first thought, _he ate Jackson. Haha!_ was the second, and the last was, _oh._

_I'll have his heart,_ he remembered all at once, the clove stink of the Witch's breath on his face, as his body shrunk in on itself. And now there wasn't anyone in the house, he realized; the apprentices would be gone until sundown, and who knew what the hell Derek was up to. Jackson was alone; if he was sharing power with Derek he was vulnerable—

"You said he tried to show you magic?" he asked, shunting his voice low, urgent. "What did he try to do?" Laura hedged away, suspicious, so he added, "This is important."

"I don't know, regular magic? I don't know what you mean," she said, and he was frustrated, he didn't have the words to explain, but he said, "Did he tell you what he was showing you? Did he—disappear some days? I don't know, anything you can tell me. Anything strange."

"He," she hesitated, and swallowed, a quick skip of her throat. Her gaze went dazed, remembering. "He never went into the shed. He told me that it was a magic door. I don't know, I thought he just didn't want to mow the lawn, and—he told me once that he liked making fire. I thought he was just using matches or a lighter, and I thought—for a long time I thought he'd done it. The house. I thought he'd burned it down. By accident, maybe—god, I hoped it was by accident, and then he disappeared right after. I think he tried to show me once but there was never anything there. Nothing I could see."

"Okay, magic doors, fire," Stiles nodded, ticking them off. This was—another world, he gathered: those cars, and he’d never heard of Afghanistan. Okay, he could deal with that, and Derek must have come to Ingary as a kid, learned magic and— "Did he ever mention names, a woman maybe?"

"He talked a lot about a witch—" and there must have been some clue on his face, some horror that welled up through his carefully bland expression, because she when she spoke next, her voice was flat with hidden panic. "The Wastelands? I thought he was playing dungeons and dragons. Why? What's going on? Hey!" But Stiles was already on his feet, shoving the crayon drawing into his pocket, which was full of—he picked up so much junk during the day, scraps of torn parchment, feather hairs from quills, the things left behind by people who know someone else will pick it up. Some of it fell out as he snatched up his cane and hurried down the hall.

There was no going back to the house; it was too far and he didn't have enough time. Jackson was alone. She could already be at the castle! But he didn't know how to get back unless—he marched down the hallway until he found a closet with a solid door he could step inside. "Be a door to the castle," he said, over Laura's cross, "What the hell are you doing?" but it didn't work. He shut the door and tried again, "Be a door to the castle! Be a door to the castle right now!" and when he opened it again, there was the staircase, and he could see Jackson's fire liming the railing high to the left. He jumped in and slammed the door, and heard a frantic banging right up until he turned the knob to Beacon, yellow up.

Jackson was furious. "Where have you been?" he demanded as Stiles hurried up the stairs; he looked all right, frowning and a little panicked and angry; had she already tried to get in?—"You forgot to leave me logs before you left!"—or maybe he thought Stiles had left him to starve, and not because they were under attack.

Stiles leaned against the railing.

"Never change," he muttered.

—

The adrenaline was tiding low, then off. He palmed his leathery cheeks, wiped his sweaty forehead, and made himself a cup of tea, and then gave Jackson a birch log—his favorite—and then sat down in the arm chair.

"I've figured out your contract," he said, finally. "It's Derek's heart right? He gave it to you?" and Jackson sighed with explicit relief and said, " _Finally_ I thought you were never going to figure it out."

"Well it's not like it was obvious!" Stiles said.

Jackson scoffed. "It totally was! I even gave you a hint."

Stiles gaped at him. "When?"

"Right at the beginning," Jackson said, in a carefully slow way. Stiles rewound that night and thought it through and then burst out, "That wasn't obvious!"

"I said I'd take your eyes or your heart! How is that not obvious?" he yelled, and Stiles thought he should just dump a bucket of water on his head and get it over with right now.

"It's not obvious because I didn't think I'd survive!" Stiles shouted back. "That was a terrible clue!"

Jackson was already yelling, "You're just too stupid to think abstractly!"

"It's not abstract it's nonsensical!" he said and Jackson said, "Well how did you think Derek survived?" and Stiles shouted, "Because I didn't think you _had his heart, you loser._ "

There was a moment of silence.

"Well, whatever, now you know," said Jackson, bored now. He was silent for a minute, and then peeked to see if Stiles was still watching and leaned forward with an expectant expression on his face. His hair was enormous with excitement. "What're you going to do about it?"

"Can't you just tell me?" Stiles asked; why was there never a clear answer for these things? Jackson scowled at him, "I don't know how, I've never done this before," and when Stiles sighed and rubbed his neck and got out the fire poker for the logs to check around in the ash, and Jackson wailed, "No don't touch it! You'll hurt me," and Stiles snarled and said, "Maybe I want to!" and Jackson said, "You'll hurt Derek too! You'll kill him!"

Stiles stopped. Jackson smirked at him, "Yeah, that's what I thought—hey!" and covered his belly with his hands where Stiles sliced the poker through it. "That hurt!"

"It did _not_ , you baby," there wasn't even a mark.

—

An hour later, he finally decided he'd worried for nothing. He was cutting up a cucumber—for a salad with bell peppers and sweet, crunchy tomatoes and sharp crumbles of cheese—when the front door slammed open, and Derek tore in.

" _Where is she!"_ he screamed, and Stiles dropped the knife and almost cut off a toe.

"Who?" Stiles said. "Erica? I don't know. They left—is she all right? Did something happen," and Derek, heaving with rage and—terror, said through clenched teeth, "No, _Laura_ , my _sister,"_ and Stiles thought, _oh no, I'm going to throw up._

"I don't—she was at her house," Stiles said, and Derek reared back. His eyes didn't track, and his whole face went an immediate, startling white.

"Did you leave anything behind?" he asked, and when Stiles shook his head, uncertain, he repeated, insistent, "Anything? Anything at all? A picture, anything, she could only get to Laura if there was something from this world left in that one. I made sure of it, that's the _only way she can get there_ ," and Stiles, weak with realization, said, "Just—a scrap of paper. It was nothing," he insisted. "It was junk!"

Derek went very still, and then turned on his booted heel and rammed out of the house, black side up.

Stiles collapsed against the counter, sick with shame.

—

"You can't leave me here alone," Jackson was yelling.

"Lock the doors," Stiles said.

He wouldn't need food. He wouldn't need the cane. He wouldn't need clothes, but a knife? Would that work on a witch? He hoped so. But could he get close enough? He didn't know. He found Derek's teleport spell in a book, the one Scott had found, and ripped it out.

"We had a deal Stiles!"

"Yeah, but look I'm all better now," Stiles said, with a wide angled sweep down the length of his new, young body. He thought, _she used me to get to Laura, to get to Derek. She_ told _me._ And now she didn't have a use for him so why waste the magic.

Jackson was still yelling when Stiles slammed the door and started running. The Wastes were hours away, but he thought—I have the spell, maybe he could make it work like he had on the door at Laura's. Like he had on any number of things: the snow way back in February, making Jackson stop the castle to let him in. Any number of things he hadn’t paid attention to.

When he was a good five hundred feet from the castle, he laid the piece of paper on the ground and traced out the loopy symbols in the dirt. When he was finished he wiped his hands on his pants and said, "You'll take me to the Witch of the Waste," and stepped in the middle of the circle. It didn't work. He moved on to another patch of dirt, drew it out again, more carefully this time. "This spot will take me to the Witch of the Waste," and when that didn't work, "This circle will transport me to where the Witch of the Waste is," and "Take me to the Witch of the Waste" and "Goddamn it work already!"

What if he'd grabbed the wrong one? He didn't know what the symbols meant, but remembered that one, the careful curve of it under Scott's neat chalk, and that one, the hasty three pronged slash. But what did he know? Those could be magical conjunctions; a 'but' with a spark. Used in everything. This could be a spell of withering impotence and he'd _never_ _know the difference_.

"Okay, don't panic, don't panic." What could he do; think of your options. Scott would know the right spell, but he and the others were down in Beacon, and Stiles didn't know where, with Allison, definitely, but where would she be? Anywhere. It was the Sumer Solstice. They'd be out celebrating. Derek and Laura would be dead by the time he found them. Jackson? Wouldn't give him a spell; he was too scared of the Witch. Lydia? That might work. She'd know a spell for sure.

The wilds were in sharp bloom, this time of year, hungry for sun and water; whole fields of thorny wild flowers and root-choking goats-hoof, tumble weeds baked crispy in the sun until they were light enough for the wind to roll right down the dirt road; sweet-smelling shoulder-high grasses, and bright yellow canola, the patchwork hills of barley and wheat and corn all the way to the other side of the valley, miles and miles and miles away. It was beautiful in the purple and red cast of twilight, thick cuts of shadows and white cotton turned pink with saturated light, and there wasn't one thing any of that could help him with. Derek was going to lose his sister—

There was a curious _thunkthunkthunk_ ing noise from behind him, and when he investigated, it turned out to be a scarecrow, hopping along towards him—the turnip scarecrow from May with the raggedy suit jacket and silk hat. It stopped in front of him.

"Did I bring you to life?" he demanded. It hesitated and then nodded. "Oh, sorry," Stiles said, "Hey do you know where the Witch of the Waste lives?" It was a long shot but then it nodded again. Stiles went for broke, "Can you take me there?"

The scarecrow wobbled this way and that so it's long tattered coat wasn't covering the two horizontal pegs where its feet should be. Stiles said, "You've got to be kidding me," and climbed on.

—

"Can you go any faster?" Yes, it turned out.

"Faster than that?" It was now at twenty feet a bound.

"Go a hundred times as fast as that!" Stiles said, clinging to its smelly neck. The countryside started blurring past. Stiles closed his eyes. That had been an awful idea, he was absolutely certain he was going to fall off and break his neck. No-one would ever find his body, or even care to look. But soon enough it stopped and Stiles fell off it into cushion of sand, and lied there, dazed and nauseous, for awhile before getting to his feet. It was very dry, all of a sudden, and he coughed, looking around.

He would definitely call this a wasteland. They’d travelled so far it was still light out, four o’clock at least. There was sand everywhere, no cacti, no shrubs. It looked sucked dry. And he remembered a rumor—that the Witch of the Waste stole life from things to stay beautiful; guess that one was real. Up ahead was an enormous sandstone fortress, square, with four tapered towers, shot through with spikes like a meat tenderizer. He started up the hill. The scarecrow followed.

"You don't have to come. It'll be dangerous," he told it, but it just hopped closer. He shrugged. "Your funeral, then."

There were two goo monsters standing sentry at the towering arch doors, but they let Stiles and the scarecrow past without a fuss. Inside was what Stiles imagined a typical castle would be like, stone and high arches. Stiles followed a long, cramped corridor to the right that eventually spat them out in a large open-air amphitheater, a clear-cut stage and fifteen rows of split rainbow seats. Who she brought out here was anyone’s guess.

Up on the stage, reposing along a sleek oval throne, draped in apple-red velvet, was the Witch of the Waste. Laura was bound and gagged at her feet. Derek wasn't anywhere to be seen; had they gotten here before him?

"There he is, the man of the hour!" the Witch said, and Stiles snarled at her, yelled, "You let her go!" and brandished his knife, pointing at Laura.

She eyed it, then him, then over his shoulder, where the five or six guards that had sprung up behind him. "I'll let you try, if you want. But you know how that'll end."

He glared, and dropped the knife.

Stiles cleared his throat; he hadn't thought of a plan until it was already spilling out of his mouth. "I'm here to offer a trade," he said. His voice wavered. He coughed again, and then adjusted his collar. Deserts were hot, who knew. "Me for her. You want magic right? That's why you're after Derek. If you take me, she isn't necessary."

The Witch slipped off the throne, one smooth twist of motion and ran her fingers down Laura's furious red cheek, who jerked away. "Who says I want magic?"

Stiles faltered, not sure now. "I don't know, power then? It's always something like that."

She rolled her eyes. "No I want to take over their world." She nudged Laura with the toe of her boot.

"World domination was totally my second guess," Stiles assured her. How could he work this: waste time until Derek got here? "And anyway, that's kind of a subset of gaining power. You're splitting unnecessary hairs here."

"I already have the power," she said blandly, "I just need the kingdom," and then she smiled, a half moon peek of a thing, and Stiles was afraid. "And Derek's heart."

"Well good for you then," he said, and swallowed. The scarecrow took off.

—

The Witch of the Waste liked to monologue. It should sound ridiculous, and it _did_ sound ridiculous; people who tried to take over the world were always ridiculous. But it also, in an odd way, had a plausibility to it. Yes, she _would_ turn America—that's what the world was called; Laura scoffed, livid—into a wasteland, and yes she _would_ create an empire to rival all that came before, and everyone would be quite delectable and Stiles would have to say he believed her; she had nothing to lose, after all; this was all a big delicious game and she held all the best cards and all the best chips and no set limits. Stiles could barely think over how much he’d fucked this up. People important to him were going to die.

"The hard part was getting Derek out of that castle, you see," the Witch was saying. "I thought he'd at least try to find Wizard Boyd," she said his name with a great deal of disdain. Stiles looked up at that.

She saw his curiosity. "They'd been friends you know, but I guess he's not very loyal." She seemed to find this acceptable. "But I did get Prince Danny out of it. And a war! But that only sent him to the front lines. You were my prize, little tailor." She caressed his cheek. "He'll do a great many things to keep you safe."

"You're wrong," Stiles said, and was certain of it.

"I'm not," she said, and then, "Oh here he is," and then there was a great explosion.

—

Stiles woke up in the black space in the basement again. He'd either died or was dreaming but there was nothing else to do but go on.

He walked for a great distance before anything popped up, and when it did it was a little like a moving picture frame.

Inside was a field of flowers and two figures; Derek and the Witch. Derek looked about sixteen, gangly and smiling, floppy hair, thin face, and Stiles recognized where they were standing. There used to be a great field of flowers outside of Beacon, hemming the Wastes to keep it from growing. You could find any kind of flower you wanted there and many people thought it was magic. It had disappeared around the time Stiles' mom had died; people thought it was a sign of something.

Derek and the Witch were talking, lilies brushing their knees, and then the Witch bent her head and kissed him. It was pretty awkward; Derek clearly didn't know what to do with himself. He finally put his shaking hands on her shoulders, and kissed her back, eyes closed, jittery with first kisses and the cascading kind of joy that came with helpless first love. As Stiles watched, the Witch slipped something in his pocket; a spell square, if he had to guess. She was smiling; it wasn't a good smile.

The image disappeared, and he walked on, heart heavy.

The next portrait was that same field, but later, and Derek looked hollow in the pale moonlight, haunted and too skinny, swaying with the wind. He was watching the sky until—yes, there, a shooting star. It crashed to the ground and skittered and skipped through the flowers on little glowing legs. Derek chased after it, but is fluttered into a puddle and died.

The next three portraits were mostly the same, like a series in a gallery; a lone figure on a hill, time passing with the flowers dying.

The last one he found he could interact with. He stepped through it and out into the flowers. They were all dead now, dry and brown petals, and crackly stems, flaking off into grains of sand. He walked until he found Derek, which didn't take long. He was standing tall and victorious on top of a small barren hill. He'd caught the star this time, was talking to it quietly with it caught in his palms, casting coruscating light through the webbing; Stiles could see the bones. Then he ate it, and for a few seconds nothing seemed to happen, but then he chest began to glow with a fierce caustic brightness, intense enough to see his skinny ribs outlined in glowing re, expanding in panic. There was a great shout of pain and then Derek held his heart in his hand, and a little fire sprite looked up at him: Jackson.

This was it then. Stiles felt a terrible, aching compassion for this Derek; cornered and scared; this wasn't how it was supposed to go. Love wasn’t supposed to do this.

"Derek!" He yelled, running now. He didn't know if they heard him, or if they could, but the hazy black edges of his peripheral vision with closing in; he was waking up or going back and he didn't even care if this was fake, or a dream, it was suddenly the most important thing in his life was to say, "I'm not going to let her hurt you again! I promise you. Find me. My name is—"

—

"Stiles!" _Slap._

"Ow!" he sat up and palmed his cheek. "That hurt!"

Laura rolled her eyes. She had a bloody lip. "It was supposed to."

"What's happening?" he asked, groggy. All at once, a goo monsters flew over their heads and exploded across the wall, and then there was a triplicate series of flash bangs. Laura stared at him; that was answer enough.

Laura tugged him around to the back of the throne, and the crouched with just their eyes cresting the curled lip of the seat. The air was full of sparkling and fuzzing magic, a hundred colors, which was when Stiles realized it was too much for one wizard, which was when he saw Lydia's fiery hair and the other three apprentices and Vernon, surprisingly, no longer a dog. They were all blasting dangerous looking spells at the forming and reforming and oozing black goop tiding in from all the open doors along the walls.

"How did they all get here?"

Laura shook her head. "I don't know, it was only Derek and the witch lady for a while and then the other six came in on the scarecrow," her voice was quavering, some high emotion.

Stiles swallowed and said, " _Six_ of them?" and then Allison appeared out of _nowhere_ and shot an arrow at a gooey head that was forming behind Laura's back, and then jogged up the dais. "Look alive, Stiles!" and hurried them off to the side just in time for a very large wolf-like creature to tackle a very large hawk-like creature into the throne and crush it into rubble.

"Where did you learn to shoot?" he asked as they hurried away. Allison, with neat grace, turned, knocked an arrow, brushed the feathers to her cheek and shot through the heads of three single file goo men. They splashed apart. "I've been taking lessons up at Lydia's. Miss Morrell has an archery field," she said, and then spun around and wailed on his arm.

"Ow!" he shouted, "Allison!" which she ignored with a darkly hissed, "What the hell, Stiles, a _note!"_

"I'm sorry!" he threw up his hands. "There were extenuating circumstances! I got turned into an old man!"

"Yeah, we _know._ Derek _told us._ _Scott,_ told us. God, I could kill you, John has been going _out of his mind_." She blew out and aggravated breath and muttered, " _Going to Porthaven,"_ and then shot another arrow, this time at a goo monster spiked through with bits of rubble like nuts in a ball of cookie dough. When the arrow hit, the ball exploded, and left stringy bits of slime in a radiating blast pattern. "Lydia put a spell on them, aren't they great?" she explained at Stiles' unattractive gape.

With that out of the way, a path out of the amphitheater was now clear. Allison herded him and Laura out the door, the others at their heels, and down the cramped hallway and through the big entrance doors until all there were all huddled in a pack in the sand, watching the fortress rock and creak and groan as large things were tossed about inside it.

"Should we be leaving him alone in there?" Stiles said. His voice sounded strange to him, so he cleared his throat.

"He'll be fine. He's always more powerful when he's angry," said Vernon, who seemed much taller and more confident now then he had the last time he'd seen him—six hours ago? He'd been a person and everything—so Stiles said, "Hey, are you you now? No more," he tired to think of a gesture that encompassed _dog_ without being offensive and failed.

“Lydia found a way to turn me back,” Vernon grinned, while Lydia studiously and pointedly looked elsewhere—she was _blushing_. "You have a remarkable sister. I haven’t seen that kind of power in ages. Transformation is one thing, but memory spells,” He looked admiringly at her then back at Stiles. “Anyway, yes. All me in here, First Wizard Boyd, of the King's Circle, nice to meet you."

"Oh, yeah, Stiles," Stiles said, and shook his hand. Boyd upped an eyebrow at that, and said, "I know, we've already met," and Stiles, said, confused, "Yeah, but I was old before," and when he looked around for agreement, he found them all staring at him with varying degrees of exasperation. "What? She just took off the spell!"

" _No,_ she _didn't,"_ Lydia shoved to the front, and then she wailed him in the arm too, "Hey!" he said, but he deserved that. Then she hugged him, already going on, "You're an idiot, that was a self-propagating transfigurative curse, it only works the first time on purpose and then it's the spellee that keeps it active," and peeled back from her and narrowed his eyes, because that sounded a whole lot like he was being blamed for something. "It feeds on despair!" she shouted, throwing up her arms when she wasn't satisfied that he understood. "You think you're old and it makes you sad and then it makes you old!"

"What, no, that's not it," he looked around but the others were nodding.

Then Scott said, "You started turning young again like, five days in, and always when you were sleeping."

"I think I would have noticed that!" Stiles insisted; although the dreams made more sense now.

"When you stopped thinking about it usually," Erica added, "Or when you got really angry." She grinned, toothy; which gave him reason to believe she was an asshole on purpose.

Laura added, palming him his knife, "And when you were saying nice things about Derek," and that was humiliating, so he turned to the scarecrow and said loudly and pointedly over their collective, incessant giggling, "You're the only one I like," and when he patted the scarecrow on the padded shoulder it turned into a man.

They all stared at him in silence.

"Danny!" Boyd said with delight, and roped him into a big, muscly hug.

"Oh, thank god I thought I was going to be like that forever," Prince Danny said.

"Hold on, what? _What?_ " Stiles said, and Danny pulled back from Boyd to kiss Stiles full on the mouth.

"Thank you for freeing me, Stiles," he said smiling, and Stiles said, " _What!"_ and Erica fell down in the sand, she was laughing so hard, and only managed to pull herself together long enough to ask, "Did you just _true love shoulder bump yourself a prince?"_ before collapsing back into the sand. She only stopped once Stiles, face uncomfortably hot and tender, snapped, "Doing better than you aren't I?"

She glared, but he was right, he was _totally right_ and she was _wrong, wrong, wrong_ , but he was saved whatever verbal lashing prepared for that when the front wall of the fortress exploded outwards and the huge lump of Derek and the Witch soared overhead, through the air a hundred feet and then whumped down into a sand dune.

They sprang away from each other. Derek was entirely a wolf now, four legged, razor back fur, twenty feet tall, and the Witch was a griffin, with high arching bronze claws that looked horribly dangerous and meant for things less vulnerable than flesh. They leapt at one another again, and crashed together with a heavy bang, which didn't sound like bodies colliding so much as immense colliding foundation stones. Derek howled; and the Witch screamed, and they flew apart once again: the Witch into a sand dune with a muffled thud and Derek into the wreckage of the fortress.

It was going well, Stiles thought; the Witch looked tired and Derek didn't and when they clashed, more often than not it was the Witch that retreated first, to the safety of distance. Then he realized why he couldn’t be happy about it.

"It's a trap," he gasped, and this time when the Witch got up, she was a woman again, didn't even look winded. They all stopped, wary of her. Derek was panting, thick strings of saliva and blood dripping from his muzzle. She held out her fist and the tension was incredible, and when she opened it, there was a little ball of goo.

Silence, then, "What?" Stiles said.

She was already laughing. "Shouldn't have left your pretty little castle all alone," she taunted, the goo falling away. And there was—

"Jackson!" Scott yelled, and they all bolted.

Jackson was tiny and blue, weak, and screamed when she squeezed down on him, Derek echoing him, human now, collapsing to the sand. Laughing crazily, she flung out an arm out at the scattered spread of them. Stiles thought viciously, _no,_ and was the only one left standing as a wave of acid green light washed over them and sent the others flying. He kept running. Laura had given him back the knife, he could—

He tried. He brought the blade around and swung at her neck, but she was strong. Physically. She caught his wrist in her free fist and it was like hitting stone; caught by a statue. He tugged back, tried to get away, but she wasn't having any of it.

Jackson was whimpering, "Stiles, Stiles," and the Witch was saying, "Is this what you want little boy?" Holding a flickering Jackson to his face, and Stiles said, "No."

That surprised her. It surprised Jackson, too, who wailed. "No?" she repeated.

"No, that's not what I want," he said. No the most. Not his dad or his mom or being at home, safe, his friends alive, untroubled, Derek, free of her. She was a taint on the world. And maybe it said something about him, some terrible sickness in him, but there wasn't anything he wanted more in that instant than—"I want you to die."

She laughed, and relaxed. "How're you going to do that? Your attack dog is useless, your friends are powerless, _you_ are nothing. Not to me," and he said again, "I want you to die," voice low, and furious and dark, intent, and that's when she looked scared.

She dropped his hand and took a step back. "What did you—"

"Die," he repeated, "Die right now, I want you to die, I want to you to drop dead. You're not going to hurt anyone every again. You're going to die. You will die. Right now _. Right now_!" and he kept saying it over and over, _die, die, die,_ this thick heavy, choking rage filling him up from his toes, blinding him, and she screamed, clawing at her throat, her face twisting in rage and fear as her skin started to rapidly degenerate, aged ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years, a thousand, until there wasn't anything left but brittle, dusty bones, and then not even that as the wind blew it away.

There was silence. Stiles collapsed to his knees, kitten weak.

"Jackson," he whispered, crawling, sand welling up along his arms as he dragged his hands through it. He was crying. Couldn't stop. He felt hollowed out. "Jackson," he repeated. He was too late, then. Jackson was dead—Derek—

"I'm over here," Jackson whispered, and Stiles found him trapped in the folds of the Witch's dress. He picked him up; he was hot, but didn't burn him. He was curled around a lump of a thing; it was pulsing weakly, off rhythm and he didn't think they had much time—

"Can I put you back in Derek now?" he asked. He was already stumbling to his feet. Derek was so far away—and Jackson whispered, "I don't know, I don't know, I'll die," and Stiles said, "Well I think you'll live as long as you want, you'll live for at least a thousand years, you're too obnoxious for anything else—so don't start complaining—" and then he was kneeling down next to Derek, his faintly rising chest riddling with oozy, sticky wounds. His sister and his apprentices and his friend and the prince all lined up like a funeral march and he hoped and prayed—let this work, oh please—and shoved Jackson back into Derek's chest.

Nothing happened. Derek's chest went still.

"Shit, shit, _no!"_ Stiles yelled, furious. "Hey, I said it would work!"

"It did, can you give me a minute?" Derek rasped, sounding like it was scraped up from his belly, and opened his eyes. Everyone erupted into cheers, and Stiles and Scott helped Derek sit up. Stiles was weak with relief. He was about to fall over when Derek lit up like the May Day, all those daytime fireworks, and Jackson burst out of his chest, shimmering the blue-white light that Stiles had seen when he'd been a star.

"Jesus Christ, Jackson!" Derek yelled, breathing hard, clutching at his breast.

"Whoops," Jackson said, insincerely. He was naked, still made of fire, but anatomically correct; at least Derek was wearing pants, tattered as they were. The girls eyed him, so did Danny, who was the only one Jackson seemed to notice, "So yeah," he said, suddenly off balance. "I'm gonna go," he didn't wait for a goodbye, just shot off into the ether.

They stared off after him. "How do we get out of here?" Stiles asked finally, and then passed out.

—

Stiles woke up in bed. His own bed, that was in his own house. That was his desk in the corner, cluttered bobbins and spools and a little model ship. It was dark outside. Middle of the night. Everyone was downstairs; they'd pulled up chairs from the kitchen and living room and the back so everyone could sit down in a circle the shop. Lydia was in the corner talking with Boyd, looking pleased and intrigued and a little off kilter, blushing faintly. The sign on the door was turned, _Closed._

"Look who finally showed up," Dad said, carrying in two handfuls of steaming mugs. Stiles stared at him, helpless and ashamed, said, "Dad, dad," and pressed his face into his shoulder once he abandoned the mugs on the counter and wrapped him up in strong solid arms.

"Gave me a scare, kiddo," he murmured.

"I'm sorry," he said, over and over, and everyone politely turned away, back to hushed conversations. Finally, embarrassed, Stiles pulled back and said, "We did it!" and then Allison swanned in the door carrying two huge bags from Camilla's and started divvying up spoils.

It wasn't until Danny had to leave with Boyd—they had a war to stop and everything, Lydia extracting some promise for another out of a happily smiling Boyd—that Stiles noticed that Derek wasn't there. He was sure that he had seen him earlier, the he'd been there the whole time, but that just made him think it was magic, so he slipped away and headed back into the workshop. Derek was sitting at Stiles' station without any lights on, nibbling on a jam jewel, lit with soft city lights. He looked up when Stiles came in.

"Are you hiding?" Stiles demanded.

"You don't have a basement," Derek said, which could be either an agreement or not, Stiles wasn't quite sure.

"Laura angry with you?" Stiles guessed; she'd been pretty quiet, staring into her drink like she was thinking of other places.

"We talked," Derek said, and his mouth turned sad at the corners. "She's pretty angry with me."

Stiles wandered up to the bench; he'd been working on a scarf before he left. It was still there, a long tatty line spooled at the corner of the table; he grabbed at it for something to do with his hands. "I'm pretty sure she's just happy you're alive."

"I hope so," Derek said, and laughed a little. It sounded sad. His expression looked so raw and unbalanced, uncertain; young, Stiles thought, and was briefly angry.

Stiles scowled. "She is," he insisted. "We all are. I am," and stood there, defiant; let him find something wrong with that if he wanted.

"I'm glad," Derek said quietly, and looked at him and _looked_ at him, quietly miserable in a way that made Stiles think maybe it had always been like this, and no one had been able to tell the difference. He wondered if it had still hurt, without a heart; that maybe it just hadn't been able to show up on his face, trapped in the fireplace but still aching. Then he said, "I'm sorry it took so long to find you."

"What?" Stiles said, distracted. "No, it's fine. It's not like any of us got hurt except for you—"

"No, I mean," Derek blew out a breath, frustrated. "In the field, the day—when I got Jackson. You told me to find you. I tried, but I didn't know you weren't my age—"

"Hold up," Stiles threw back his hands. "That was _real?"_ and Derek blinked at him then rolled his eyes, done with him completely and said, " _Stiles,"_ and Stiles said, “I thought I was hallucinating! Or brain damaged!"

"You weren't," Derek said, prim. “Well,” he reconsidered that last part.

"Well, fine," Stiles said, not letting him say it.

Derek looked away and back toward the window. “I thought on May Day—I don’t know. I thought you’d be safe from her. I didn’t know she’d go after you. And then when you got to the castle.” He shook his head, recriminating. “I tried to find a spell to turn you back, but there wasn’t anything.”

“Yeah, self-propagating transfigurative curse,” Stiles said by rote. “Not your fault.”

“She shouldn’t have known about you. I almost didn’t step in—with the thugs. I knew she’d be suspicious but.”

“Well I’m glad I didn’t get beaten up,” Stiles said awkwardly. They stood there in silence until it became unbearable, and then Stiles said, "Yeah, I can't take it anymore," and kissed him, and kissed him, and Derek stood up out of the chair and wrapped his arms around him, pressed his big square hands to Stiles' spine, one above the other, and kissed him back.

Finally, shivering and gulping air and tipsy, Stiles said, hushed between the warm, wet space of their mouths, "I'm glad you're here."

"Yeah," Derek hummed, eyes mostly closed as he kissed Stiles again. "Me too," and, "Yeah, I just—" and, "The castle was destroyed," between kisses. Stiles yanked back.

" _Destroyed_?"

Derek frowning with all this non-kissing, said, "Yeah, without Jackson it can't stick together."

Stiles blinked. "I never really believed him when he said that, oops," and Derek laughed, soft, joyful, and when Stiles said, "I'm sorry," Derek shook his head, kissed him again, and then again, and snuck a hand up the back of his shirt, palm cool against his sweaty skin, and said, "It's better this way."

Derek kissed him again. Stiles was helpless against it. “We can always build another one,” he murmured.

Stiles hummed, distracted by the sweet left corner of Derek's mouth and said, "A bigger one this time." 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm over [here](http://ecarian.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


End file.
